


Take Your Aim

by polytropic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Resurrection, alternate season 3, warning: memories of non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six months after the Worm Moon comes the Harvest Moon. Lydia has a plan to get Beacon Hills back to where it belongs, and it's not like resurrection is particularly hard. Practice makes perfect, after all. </p>
<p>With Laura Hale, Lydia may have gotten more than she expected, but exactly what she bargained for. </p>
<p>(Alternate Season 3, mostly a love song to my favorite Teen Wolf ladies)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic diverges from canon right before the start of Season 3 and I'm scrapping most of Season 3A's plot apart from the pieces I particularly liked. It's also a WiP, so I can't actually tell you all that much about it yet: just that I've been kicking it around for a long time and am excited to finally show it off. 
> 
> One thing I can tell you is that I am totally unashamed about idolizing Laura Hale. If your meta or headcanon says she would be a bad alpha/sibling/person, that's cool, you run with that. But basically this is the fix-it fic of my heart, and I could worry about giving Laura realistic flaws or I could do my damnedest to make people cheer for her every move and that's not a hard choice for me.
> 
> Warnings right now are for memories of violence, and memories of attempted rape. I expect those warnings to increase but I will always update the tagged warnings before I update the story, and anything that I worry will trigger people will go in the notes for the chapter. Please let me know if there's anything I'm neglecting to warn for. 
> 
> Title is from "Titanium" by David Guetta feat. Sia. Yep, named it after a song again, I am the height of creativity.

It wasn’t like being asleep, and that was all Laura was going to say about it, but coming back was weirdly like waking up. Her eyes were gummy, she felt like shit, and someone was shaking her shoulder.

She sat up and there was an immediate spear of agony from her stomach. “Fffuck,” she hissed, and the girl who’d been shaking her skipped a step back and said matter-of-factly,

“Yes, I’d be careful with that. I don’t think it’s quite healed fully yet from that whole bisection thing.”

Laura pressed a hand to where the pain was, felt along the raised edge of a scar. A scar. She had literally been _cut in half_ , and now all there was was a scar. She looked back up at the girl, who was struggling to unhook a large mirror from the wall. Red hair, cute dress, small, maybe college age. Completely unfamiliar.

“You…” He throat croaked. She cleared it and tried again. “You brought me back.”

The girl let go of the mirror with a huff of exertion or irritation, and turned. “Yes, I did. Can you stand?”

Laura tried, and got her feet under her on the second attempt. She felt thin and woozy, but even that was better than feeling nothing. There was a thin film of purple dust on her shoulders that her nose told her was wolfsbane, and when she looked down her hand was dark with blood that certainly didn’t smell like her own.

She wanted to ask about the how, but that could wait. There was a more pressing question. “Why?”

She was certain she’d never seen this girl before in her life. Then again, who knew how long she’d been…out of commission. For all she knew this could be Derek’s _granddaughter_. She met Laura’s eyes squarely, head slightly cocked and eyebrows raised in gentile defiance.

“Peter was glad you were dead. I felt like taking something away from him.” That stunned Laura into silence—Peter, jesus fuck, Uncle Peter had ripped her throat out and torn her in half, Peter was alive and moving around and he had killed her—and the girl turned back to the mirror. She got it off the wall at last and lowered it carefully to the ground, wiping her hands off afterwards with a grimace of distaste.

“Is he the Alpha now?”

“No. We’re a little spoiled for choice in that department, actually.” Laura wasn’t sure what that meant. “Now, I have a couple of questions for you, and then I’m going to decide what I tell you and where I take you.”

Weirdly, Laura found that perfectly fair. The girl didn’t know her, obviously was dealing with some shit, and Laura was perfectly capable of busting down one of the walls and taking off on her own if she didn’t like the conclusions the girl came to.

“All right. One more question from me, though: what’s your name?”

“Lydia Martin.”

Laura considered holding out a hand to shake, and decided against it. She needed both of them bracing her against the wall right now, though she could feel herself getting stronger little by little.

“Laura Hale.”

“I know.”

“I figured.” Laura grinned when the girl looked at her sharply, the bright arrogant flash of teeth that always pissed Derek off. It just made Lydia look thoughtful.

“You were the Alpha before you died, weren’t you?” Oh, so they were starting the cross-examination, then.

“Yes.”

“Did you ever bite anyone?”

Laura considered making a joke about sex and restrained herself. There was a time and place when “bad taste” was applicable, and being recently resurrected in the ashes of your burned down house was one of them. Probably.

“Nope. We were never really at the point where we could handle more betas, much less turning someone.”

Lydia nodded as if she was making mental notes. Laura didn’t understand why these questions were important, but something about the way Lydia’s hand always stayed close to the pocket of her skirt made her think that going along and answering them was best for everybody. There was something in there Laura didn’t want to encounter; the air in the room smelled like oil and wolfsbane.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Yes.”

“A human?”

“Yes.”

These were not good questions. Laura didn’t like these questions at all, they brought back being nineteen years old and terrified, throwing up over a hunter’s corpse while she tried frantically to remember how you healed a wolfsbane-infected gunshot wound. Not wanting to go back to Derek with blood on her mouth and the smell of death all around her; not wanting him to have to see that. Realizing that if she didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t have to know. If she wasn’t ever going to be clean of it, the next best thing was to pretend it hadn’t happened. Derek didn’t have to know that she’d broken the Code; that now if the hunters killed them both it would be her fault.

She had never actually told him, Laura realized. He still didn’t know that the beta who’d held her down, put his claws to her throat and tried to spread her legs wasn’t the first person she’d killed.

Laura realized she’d missed a question, staring blankly at the fire-blackened wall. “Sorry, what?”

Lydia was watching her closely, too closely for Laura’s peace of mind. “Never mind,” she said, which didn’t help Laura’s suspicion.  

“What, that’s all? ‘Are you a murderer, yes, okay cool, moving on’?”

“Pretty much.” Lydia appeared to consult a mental checklist. “Did you hit your brother, ever? Break any bones?”

“I would _never_.” It came out low and snarly, from the angry place in her chest, and Laura dialed herself back down immediately when Lydia flinched back. “Sorry.”

Her apology was rejected with a toss of red-gold hair and a narrowing of neatly mascara-d eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

“What, that I’m sorry?”

“That too. But I’ve seen werewolves train.”

“Derek and I didn’t train.”

“Really?” Lydia’s eyebrows shot straight up incredulously. Laura glowered. She was putting up with a lot of bullshit as thanks for reviving her from the dead, but some human teenager deciding she had the right to judge Laura’s decisions as alpha was too far.

“Yes, _really_. It’s cute that you’ve seen some deluded soul try their best to keep their pack safe by throwing each other into walls a lot and decided you understand who we are and what we do, but newsflash? This training crap is people’s last resort against _being wiped out_. Not that it works. What’s the point of learning to fight other werewolves when there’s a sniper who already has you in their sights from farther away than you can even smell?”

Cora used to call it Laura’s big-sister-itis flaring up when she got going on a rant like this. Derek would roll his eyes and sigh and make the face that said he was arguing with her in his head. At the moment, though, Laura had been very quiet for a very long time and she figured she was allowed at least one really good lecture.

“So you can take your assumptions about werewolves being inherently violent and get out of my house, thanks, because we’re literally standing in an example of why alphas think the only thing left to do is to make themselves stronger, any way they can. And I took enough crap from alphas who wanted to _teach_ me how to train Derek that I don’t need to take it from you too.”

Laura laughed, only now realizing the irony of that. Her tactics had, in fact, gotten her killed. Fuck. Technically, they’d all been right; she’d been soft, and someone had buried his claws in her soft little belly and ripped her right open. But then again, here she was. They’d killed her but they hadn’t managed to make it stick.

“But you didn’t?”

“That’s not how my mother taught me.”

“Noble.” Lydia’s grimace said it clearly wasn’t a compliment.

“Pragmatic. If there’s no distinction between how you treat your pack and how you treat your enemies, what’s the incentive not to piss you off? I save pain for the people on my bad side. Drives home the point that it’s where you don’t want to be.” Laura grinned again, wide and a little feral, mostly to see what Lydia would do. She just nodded, inscrutable.

“And if I told you where Peter was right now?”

That was the million dollar question, obviously. Laura thought about it: thought about Uncle Peter who had always been the classy one, the one everyone went to for fashion tips and career advice. Mom had been so close with him, they did that wordless communication thing that she and Cora used to make fun of all the time. Grown-up telepathy. They used to joke that obviously it only worked when thinking about totally boring things like inter-pack politics.

Peter was never really a tactile person, weird for their otherwise physically close family. Instead of a hug he would look at you and smile and it would be like a remote hug, an intangible blanket of warmth. Laura had resigned herself to never feeling that again. To never hearing one of Peter’s obnoxious, grandiose speeches about history ever again, to never laughing at how red Derek turned when Peter teased him…all of the “never again”s that she had for everyone she’d lost.

She didn’t know who came out of that coma, Laura realized, but it wasn’t Peter. He belonged with the never agains, safe and dead and precious. Whoever was walking around wearing his skin was an enemy.

“I’d ask him why. I’d ask him how many other people he’s hurt. And then I’m going to kill him.”

Lydia looked unimpressed. “Can you, right now?”

Laura took stock. Legs: holding her up, but not enthusiastic about much more than that. Middle: in pain. Claws: slow to appear. Alpha status: gone.

“…probably not.”

“Refreshingly honest, at least.”

_Don’t worry, I’m still more than capable of dealing with whatever you throw at me._ She didn’t say it; it seldom paid to be the first one to make the overt threat. 

“So, Ms. Lydia Martin, I’ve answered all of your questions. Is it maybe my turn to get some vague idea of what the hell is going on?”

“Sure.” Lydia sat herself on a piece of broken wall, sweeping her skirt underneath her primly, and looked straight into Laura’s eyes in a clear challenge. “Six months ago exactly your uncle forced me to resurrect him from the dead. One month before that, your brother tore his throat out. Currently Beacon Hills is under attack by three separate hostile forces, all of whose presences can be traced back to those original events. There have been forty-three civilian deaths in Beacon Hills in the past year; the average deaths per year in the United States is 5.6 for a town of 100,000.”

“Did you know the public library carries newspaper records from almost 150 years ago? That’s before the Hales moved here. Beacon Hills used to be a pretty crazy place, apparently. Unexplained disappearances, strange phenomena, idiopathic conditions…. But you know, the last time this kind of statistically significant spike in “wild animal” and “serial killer” activity happened was just after the Hales showed up. After that it’s all quite peaceful, more so than most other towns of comparable size and configuration.”

“Apparently Beacon Hills does well with a werewolf or two in residence, but we don’t like changes in regime.” The word ‘regime’ fit obscenely well into that carefully lipsticked mouth; unbidden, a whisper of ‘kingmaker’ slid itself into Laura’s thoughts. “This chaos doesn’t seem to be lending itself to a healthy transition of power, so I thought to myself, why not go with what we know? Hale Alphas have done well for us so far.”

Laura felt that sharp gaze almost like a physical weight, pinning her upright where her legs might have betrayed her.  Her head was full of a roar, the white noise struggle of too much information at once. Lydia leaned forward, and her regard was like a spotlight.

“I examined the candidates, and you’re my bet. But if I’m wrong, I won’t hesitate to put you back in the ground. Am I wrong, Laura?”

Laura took a deep breath, and with an effort that made her torn up middle scream, pushed herself off the wall.

“That’s Alpha Hale to you.”

“Good. Let’s get started.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Underage warning has been added to the tag list for mentions of canonical consensual sex between people both under the age of 18. Also in this chapter, one character makes another character uncomfortable due to different cultural backgrounds regarding nudity.

Lydia’s house was in one of the new developments in Beacon Hills, large and modern and surprisingly empty. Laura looked around, noted that the only scent other than Lydia’s was thin and faded, and raised an eyebrow.

“You live alone?”

“I’m sixteen, and emancipation procedures are cumbersome,” Lydia replied, tossing the bag of mirrors and who-knew-what-else onto a couch carelessly. “My mother is hoping that if she spends all her time at her new boyfriend’s condo, we’ll never have to talk about the fact that he exists.”

 _No pack. Alone and angry_ , Laura’s mind translated. “And you’re not taking the opportunity to have weekly parties? Wow, high school has changed since I was there.”

“I’m a little burned out on parties, recently.” Lydia beckoned her to follow as she headed up the stairs and along a carpeted hallway. No family pictures on the walls, just expensive-looking art photos. “These days I’m more into small, intimate gatherings.” She opened the door to what was obviously her room, and the faint smell of sex made it pretty clear what she meant. Laura laughed. 

“And now you have to hide me here instead. Sorry to cramp your style.”

“It’s track season anyways; boring.”

Lydia retrieved a laptop from her bed and then herded Laura back out. Just down the hall from Lydia’s door was a spare room, perfectly made up and almost smell-less from how long it had been empty. Clearly an interior decorator had been let loose—everything was muted shades of blue and green, from the massive bed to the carpet and curtains. There was a full, almost ceiling-height wardrobe, for all those clothes Laura didn’t have.

Laura had been staying at a motel before she’d died. The Martin guest room experience was certainly a step up.

“Spare blankets are in the closet, bathroom down the hall, here’s a towel set,” Lydia listed, and if she said anything else Laura’s didn’t hear it because the possibility of a hot shower had just unfolded in her future with a sound like choirs of angels singing. 

“Yes, awesome, thank you so much, towels please.” She grabbed them, careful to be only humanly fast, and stripped her shirt and bra off without a second thought.

“Excuse you!” Lydia’s hands flew into the air. Laura blinked, paused, then realized the problem and wrapped one of the towels around her chest. Shit. Lydia looked judgmental; she smelled embarrassed.

“Sorry. Surprise nudity, not a thing most people are prepared for, my bad.” Laura tried out the rueful look that always seemed to defuse situations for Derek. It appeared mildly successful. “I was on the swim team, you lose all sense of boundaries when you’re half-naked that often.”

“I thought it was a werewolf thing.” Aw, was that a little tinge of pink in those perfectly made-up cheeks?

“That too.” Laura shrugged one shoulder, then grabbed for the towel before it fell. “Anyways, sorry for subjecting you to my tits without warning, but I’m covered in blood and toxic substances and grave-dirt, so, where was the bathroom again?”

Lydia pursed her lips, looked deeply annoyed with Laura’s entire existence for a long moment, then transitioned seamlessly into a gleaming hostess smile. “This way please,” she said sweetly, and swept past Laura down the hallway.

“Girl you are a piece of work,” Laura muttered, and followed. “If the whole ‘domination of the supernatural world through puppet-rulers’ thing doesn’t work out, you’re going to make an amazing Stepford Wife.”

The water pressure in the shower was like a religious experience, and Laura emerged feeling warm and benevolent towards human and werewolfkind. She wrapped herself back in the towel, and when she got back to the guest room, there were clean pajamas lying out on the bed.

“I should die more often, if this is the treatment I get,” she observed, and put them on. They fit, and she wondered idly if she was wearing Lydia’s mother’s clothing. Still toweling her hair off, she crossed the hall to Lydia’s room, where she could hear her moving about, and knocked.

“Come in!” Lydia was lounging on the bed, long pale legs extended and skirt flared in perfect symmetry. The scene looked so pin-up it had to be intentional, but Laura didn’t comment, just took a seat in the chair by the desk.

“So. ‘Let’s get started’?”

“Yes, let’s.” Lydia made that split-second switch from beauty queen back to scientist again; her posture coiled from artfully arranged to intent, and her eyes turned measuring. “Our goals are to remove the hostile forces from Beacon Hills without further loss of civilian life, and to instate and secure you as Alpha so that further incursions are discouraged.”

Laura snorted. “Oh, is that all.”

It made her head spin, how fast this all was moving. Before she died, she hadn’t even decided yet if she planned on staying in Beacon Hills. She’d come because she thought she might finally get some answers (she’d come because Peter had lured her, that was obvious now, stupid stupid stupid, this was why she needed Derek, he was the careful one), and she hadn’t expected the town to feel familiar. She’d expected to feel sick, seeing the places they used to go before their life burned down. It was weird that it felt nice. It was weird that she’d liked it here, that she’d found herself thinking, pulling into the driveway of the house, _I know why they chose this spot. It feels right_.

She’d been buried in the roots of her home, and risen back up through its floor. Laura wasn’t sure going back to New York was an option any more, not with how her feet felt moored here, six feet under and ready to cling. Not to mention this teenage girl with sharp eyes and pink lipgloss asking her to stake her claim in blood.

Blood. Blood meant family, and there was one thing she needed to know _right now_. “You said Derek was here. Is he…what happened to him?”

“That question probably requires a Greek tragic chorus to properly answer,” Lydia replied tartly, and Laura clenched her hand into a fist and didn’t jump out of the chair and didn’t think about rage and claws and that smug expression, because if Derek was dead and she was going to say it like _that_ —

“To be honest I don’t even want to think about it long enough to explain it. To paraphrase an acquaintance: He lives in a creepy loft and thinks he’s Batman and he’s making a mess of everything.”

Laura felt her fist clench once, convulsively, and then loosen. Lives. She’d said ‘he lives.’ “I need his address please.”

“Not happening.” Laura’s head jerked up and she glared; Lydia flinched back and tried, too late, to turn it into a languid recline. “I’m assuming he’s being watched. Anything he knows, the Alpha Pack could know, and your introduction is going to go a lot smoother if we can choose how it happens.”

“Which will be when,” Laura gritted out, teeth clenched. Knowing Derek was alive but wasn’t okay made her leg muscles tense, trying to stand even though she had nowhere to go. If she was stronger she could follow his scent, but it was a big town and the idea of trying to track right now made her head spin.

“When we’re ready.” Lydia pointedly looked away from Laura’s grimace of annoyance. She flipped open a bright pink laptop, and turned it around so that Laura could see the screen. It was a spreadsheet. “This is everything I know about the werewolves currently in Beacon Hills. The second sheet is everything supernatural but non-werewolf, and the third is a timeline of events. It’s missing pieces. Once you’ve absorbed the information there I’ll call a friend and have him fill some of them in.”

Laura’s eyebrows arched in disbelief. “I rose from the dead three hours ago and you’re assigning me homework.”

“Add your own information to the bottom of sheet one,” Lydia replied sweetly, then picked up a book (“Linear and Non-Linear Wave Motion”) and proceeded to ignore her.

Laura settled down with the laptop, prepared to find the whole thing ridiculous. Was two spreadsheets and, christ, was that _six_ text documents, really more effective than just sitting her down and telling her what the hell was going on? She’d never really been into the whole ‘get a giant map and stand around it looking serious and making notes with cryptic symbols’ style of planning. Laura was definitely more of a brainstormer.

Except as she read through the materials, she was reluctantly and grudgingly impressed. The timeline began two weeks after she’d died and ran right up to the present. The document on the current werewolf population came with a chart of relationships between all the individuals currently involved in Beacon Hills’ struggles and a detailed analysis of the alpha qualities of each contestant based on over thirty criteria. Someone could have told her all this verbally, but she wouldn’t have been able to keep it all straight, much less see it summarized in a final percentage score. One that looked a little bit like code for ‘oh shit.’

“Fuck fuckity fuck!”

“Excuse you?” Lydia looked comically disdainful at Laura’s outburst, but she was having trouble finding anything funny right now.

“You might have said this already but I didn’t internalize it, fuck, the Alpha Pack is here?!”

“I told you to read spreadsheet one first.”

“I’m a lateral thinker. You’re sure Deucalion and Kali are here, they didn’t just send a representative?”

“You sound like you know them.” That was a loaded tone if Laura had ever heard one, and she took a deep breath and tried to get her pounding heart under control. Funny how just seeing a name written in black and white could catapult you right back in time. She hadn’t even seen any of it happen, she’d just run down to greet her mother when she got home and seen her face and heard her whisper the name of the friendly, level-headed Alpha with nice hair who had seemed so _normal_ two days earlier.

Deucalion. He’d started calling himself the “Alpha of Alphas” after, Laura remembered. But Talia had called him “pack-killer”, eyes hard and furious when the news came of what he had convinced Kali to do.

“I know about them. Everyone does. My mom called him—Deucalion—a zealot. He has a _vision_ ,” she saw Lydia’ eyebrows raise at the way she spit the word, “of a stronger kind of werewolf. Blah blah blah eugenics, survival of the fittest, whatever. It’s incoherent, and my opinion was always that because he snapped and killed his whole pack, he’s been trying to make other people do the same ever since just to convince himself he’s not a monster.”

“That’s certainly a conventionally criminological conclusion,” Lydia assessed, seeming unconcerned. “So he isn’t here to take over? Give me back that computer, I need to change my calculations.”

“Just a second.” Lydia exhaled a little huff of incredulous offense, and Laura grinned. This girl might not be completely the spoiled high school sweetheart she pretended, but she was enough of a princess to be hilarious when told ‘no’. “Keep your tights on, I’m trying to figure out what he _is_ here for. More data for you, and all that.”

“ _Fine_.” Lydia snapped open her book again with slightly unnecessary force.

Laura went back to the relationship diagram. Derek had bitten four people? _Why_? It defied logic, she almost wondered if someone might be impersonating him. Derek hated people, and he hated feeling like they expected things from him or needed him emotionally, and she just…it made no sense. He was the last person likely to make himself Betas, certainly not with the Alpha power he’d never been expecting to possess.

Maybe he was hoping to find one to take over from him as Alpha. She scanned Lydia’s spreadsheet again. There it was; the second highest total score, Vernon Boyd. Maybe Derek had been looking for a lifeline.

Before she could look up and ask Lydia about it, though, her eyes flicked to the highest score on the sheet.

“Scott McCall. The one Peter bit. He’s first on here, why didn’t you choose him as your candidate?”

“He’s not an Alpha.”

Laura frowned. “But you scored him higher than both Derek and Peter on his ability to ‘establish a leadership role in a group context.’”

“I don’t see your point.”

“…nothing, I guess.” Laura wasn’t even sure yet what her point was. Something was nagging at her, though, something about why Scott McCall, who wasn’t even in Derek’s pack, would be showing more leadership than him in a crisis.

“Great, that sounds _not at all_ like a vague hint that will come back and make problems later,” Lydia said brightly, and snatched the computer back. “Tell me why Deucalion—what a stupid name—is here.”

Laura sighed and flung herself back into the desk chair. It creaked warningly, Lydia shot her a disapproving look, and she ignored both. “I only know what he’s done in the past. He shows up to…court, I guess, Alphas. He talks to them, he threatens them, I honestly don’t know what he does. But those Alphas either kill their packs and join him, or he finds a beta who’s willing to do it instead. Either way he leaves a trail of dead werewolves behind him. He’s as bad as the hunters, and every single one of his pack must be crazy as fuck because I don’t see any other way to live after doing that to your people.”

The steady clacking of Lydia’s keys was soothing, but Laura’s heart still felt like it was trying to jump out of her ribcage. Derek was the Alpha. Derek was the one Deucalion had his sights on. And Derek would never kill a pack member, not in a million years, so the other option was…

Laura swallowed convulsively. “Which of Derek’s betas do you trust the least? They may be planning to kill him, and everyone else in his pack.”

Lydia’s hands stilled on the keys. Her face looked frozen for a moment, and then she shook her head. “You didn’t finish the third document, did you.”

“No, I had an Alpha Pack freakout first, which I think is reasonable.”

“Fine, but if you had, you’d see that two of Derek’s betas are missing. Have been for months. And we just found out last week that they’d been taken by the Alpha Pack.”

“Shit.” Laura made a grab for the computer; Lydia deftly slid it out of her reach. She could easily take it, of course, but she hadn’t missed how Lydia flinched whenever she moved too fast or got to close. She was scared, either of Laura specifically or werewolves in general. But for someone so delicate in a room with a predator, she did a good job of hiding or ignoring it, and Laura didn’t care to exacerbate the situation. So she kept her distance, the way she’d been doing her whole life, from fragile humans and straight girls who were scared of her. “Okay, okay, keep your little pastel horror. Which ones were taken?”

“Boyd and Erica.”

Laura tried to remember who those were. Pictures attached to their names might have been helpful, in retrospect. “Numbers two and six?”

“Two and five, actually. She’d be higher if I’d ever seen her display a hint of planning skills. Or if I could just merge her and Lahey into one person, plus impulse control.” Lydia sighed as if her inability to mutate people’s abilities and inclinations at will was deeply tiresome.

“That’s very sad for you, I’m sure. Are they still alive?”

“Derek and Isaac think so.”

“He’d feel it if they weren’t,” Laura agreed. “Has he gotten anything else from them? He should know if they’re in pain or angry, if they’re shifted…” She trailed off. “You have no idea. You’re not working with Derek. Why?”

Lydia’s mouth thinned. “Because he’s working with Peter.”

Shit. Shit goddamn, what a fucking mess. “I can’t absorb this from a relationship chart. Not even a perfectly color-coordinated one, not that I don’t appreciate the effort. I need you to lay this out for me, who hates who and who talks to each other. You wanted me to add what I’m good at to your spreadsheet? It’s this stuff, untangling people so they work together. So give me something to work with.”

Lydia was still for a moment. “I need two more people here in order to do that, and it’s the middle of the night,” she said at last. “We can pick up there in the morning?”

“Sure. Don’t you have school, though?” At this point Laura wouldn’t really have been surprised if Lydia had tossed her hair and replied that she’d been given special dispensation by the district because school was obsolete for her.

“I’ll call myself in sick. Because I have delicate nerves.” Lydia batted her eyes, the motion practiced and unfairly charming. “And Allison and Stiles will too, it’s not like either of them need to be in class.”

“Fair enough. I guess I’ll see you in the morning, then.” Laura hauled herself up from the chair, her stomach still aching fiercely. At the door, she paused.

“And Lydia?” She looked up, hair a glowing halo in the light of her screen. “Thank you. The more I see, the gladder I am that you’re on my side.” Laura closed the door on her expression of open-mouthed shock, and went to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like everyone to know that I actually made the spreadsheet and relationship chart that are mentioned in this chapter. The spreadsheet literally does have more than 30 criteria with associated numerical analysis. I am the king of nerds and feel no shame.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For people who asked to see the spreadsheet, I'd be happy to show it to you but I have no idea how to upload a spreadsheet into AO3? I don't think it supports it. I guess you could PM me your email and I could send it to you? Feel free to do that. 
> 
> Warning for this chapter: minor character death, blood, threat of physical harm from one character to another, weird bodily consent dynamics having to do with one character having been dead at the time. Let me know if any of those belong in the tagged warnings.

She woke to the sound of screaming. It was piercing and somehow reverberated in her skull; it filled up her head until it felt like the sound was leaking out of her eyeballs. Even after it had gone silent she lay curled up in her borrowed bed for a while, hands clasped over her ears to try to ease the pain. It felt like the screaming had re-arranged her headspace, so overwhelmingly loud and insistent that it had pushed some of Laura’s brain out of the way to make room.

She only roused herself when she heard the front door slam, and it took another few minutes of confusion and lingering pain for her to put the pieces together. Lydia. That scream had come from Lydia, and the chug of an engine pulling away was Lydia too. Lydia had woken in the night, shattered the sound barrier, and then driven off.

“What even the hell,” Laura announced to the silent room, and hauled herself out of bed. Allies didn’t let allies drive off into hostile territory under the influence of nightmares, she was pretty sure that had been in one of her leadership guidebooks somewhere.

She was ashamed to admit it, but she lost the car almost immediately. At her best Laura could run 40 miles per hour; right now she’d be surprised if she could manage 20. She tried to follow the car’s trail for a little while longer, enough to know that Lydia wasn’t heading out of town or towards the freeway, but she eventually had to admit that she was sunk.

She was also massively confused. Of all the reasons she could think of to get in the car and head out in the middle of the night after a nightmare (panic attack; need for a distraction booty call; comfort food; sudden period and no supplies in the house), none of them seemed to fit with the girl who had been so security-conscious, and so _afraid_. Lydia had seemed like someone who was building herself a fortress and army against a sea of dangers; wandering out into the night of the full moon made no sense.  

And then she heard the scream again.

Forget 40mph, Laura hit speeds she didn’t know _existed_. The town literally blurred around her, and when she finally stopped she felt like the wind of her passing had taken her own breath away. She stumbled and reeled, utterly disoriented; her foot came down with a squeak of sneakers on wet tile and only werewolf reflexes stopped her from falling straight into a pool. There was a pool there. Okay. Okay, so, the community center. Right.

Then she saw the body, and Lydia.

“Oh. Oh honey, okay, don’t touch that.” She sounded like her mother, Laura realized as she crouched and very gently moved Lydia’s hands away from the blood. How her mother’s voice had sounded when Grandpa Ellis had died, and dad had worked so long in the garden that his hands had started shaking and couldn’t stop. Lydia’s hands were shaking now too. “Let’s just…clean that. Diseases, and all.” She took the edge of her borrowed shirt and wiped Lydia’s hands clean.

“I didn’t do it,” Lydia whispered, eyes shut very tightly. “I didn’t do it last year and I didn’t do it now and I don’t…I don’t…I don’t remember leaving the house…”

“You didn’t do it,” Laura agreed, for lack of anything more constructive to say. Of course she hadn’t; the body was bleeding from the head like it had been bashed in. Lydia might be stronger than she looked, maybe even strong enough to cave in a boy’s skull, but she’d have had to stand on tiptoes and still probably wouldn’t have had enough leverage. Not to mention how old the blood smelled.

Sometimes being your own CSI team was pretty awesome, really. Except the part where you crouched next to a murdered boy and tried to stop your one existent political ally from hyperventilating. “You weren’t even here when he died, Lydia. You just found the body, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Why am I _here_?”

“Well that’s a complex and important ontological question, one we should definitely address though possibly not in our pajamas…”

“You are not funny.” Laura had gotten her to turn away from the body by now, and Lydia slowly managed to un-clench her fists and open her eyes. There was blood smeared between her fingers; Laura cleaned them off.

“I’m a little funny.”

“Not at all, really.” _There_ was the unimpressed tone Laura had gotten used to. Good to have it back. “We should call the police.”

“Hah, uh, let’s not.” Lydia glanced up at her, a swift questioning flick of her head. Laura shrugged. “Legally dead person with no address, teenage girl out past curfew who can’t explain why she’s here. Not a recipe for awesome, police-wise.”

“Then I’m calling Stiles.”

“What the hell is a ‘Stiles’?”

“I know, right?”

Stiles turned out to be a boy whose limbs all seemed to be trying to set out to seek their own separate fortunes, and who arrived with a screech of car tires while Laura was still trying to argue Lydia into leaving the scene of the crime.

“Oh my god, is he dead?” he hissed when he saw the body, and continued from there without pausing for an answer. “Why is he here? Why are _you_ here?”

“I…sleep-drove. Or something. Never mind, Stiles, just call your dad!”

“And explain why I’m here how, exactly?”

“Psychic powers, innate weirdness, I don’t care!”

“Nice. Real nice. And who is she?”

Laura realized as Stiles turned to squint at her that she was probably supposed to have vanished by the time he arrived. Lydia’s mouth twisted. 

“My…cousin!” Lydia’s voice came out high-pitched and forcedly perky. “From out of town!”

“What, she came with you to the _murder scene_? Was she sleep-driving too?”

“Yes.” “No.”

“Uh…?”

“No?”

Laura rolled her eyes. Stiles focused on the motion, and his mouth dropped open like it was on a hinge. “Oh holy god you’re Derek’s sister.”

_Well, that was fast._ Laura shrugged and grinned; Stiles backed away so fast he almost tripped himself. “Jeez. Chill out kid, I come in peace.”

“Ahaha, yes, I’m sure, that seems plausible. Derek’s sister, she comes in peace. The dead one. The, like, dead-dead one, cut-in-half-I-dug-up-your-body-so-I-really-know-what-I’m-talking-about-here one. Derek’s dead sister is going to rip my throat out.”

“You dug up my _body_? Why the hell would you…?” God, how was she even supposed to feel about that? Ew, had this kid touched her while she was dead? What a weird, gross thought. 

“We were conducting an investigation, there was a whole thing, I recognize now that it might have seemed disrespectful or, say, creepy, let’s just agree to let bygones be bygones and focus on the fact that, oh yeah, you were a dead body and now you’re not! Why does this keep _happening_?”

“Hales are bad at staying dead,” Lydia supplied, with the dismissive tone Laura was starting to interpret as ‘everyone should stop wasting time and focus on what’s important here, namely, me’. “It’s a thing with them, apparently. Look at her Stiles, does she really look like she’s a walking disaster or a serial killer like the other two?”

Stiles squinted at Laura suspiciously. She obligingly smiled her Nice Girl From Down The Block smile. He looked only slightly mollified. “You never know.”

“That phrase is a crutch for people unwilling to devote the necessary time to develop and calibrate predictive models.” Annoyed at her opinion being doubted, or honestly crusading against conversational inanities? Laura couldn’t tell.

“Okay, sure. And what about the phrase ‘You’re standing next to a zombie werewolf and a guy with his head bashed in, incidentally it’s the full moon, can we please go home now’?”

“…that one’s okay.”

Lydia turned on her heel and started back to her car, skirting a wide edge around the body as if she'd just happened to walk that route completely unintentionally. Laura glanced at her, at the steady stain of blood dispersing into the pool, and then at Stiles. 

"Mention either of us were here to the cops, and I'll break your fingers. Three of them, because it's three fucking am and I'm tired," she told him sweetly. 

Stiles' breath made a funny choking sound in his chest. "What, not rip my throat out?" he joked, weakly defiant. 

"I don't make threats I don't intend to--wait." Something on the edge of her senses, too fast and faint to identify, and suddenly all her arm hair was standing on end. The next minute she heard it, the crouch and leap of wolves approaching, and she moved. Stiles yelped when she grabbed the back of his shirt and threw him towards Lydia's car; Lydia gasped and shrank away when Laura shoved her and Stiles against the side door. 

"Down, down, get down and stay right the fuck there," she hissed. She didn't wait to see if they obeyed, just turned her back on them and crouched to face the threat, teeth bared. 

Two werewolves rounded the corner, eyes wide and breath sharp. Laura snarled; the girl, slim with a riot of bright hair, snarled back with instant fury. The boy, tall with dark skin and a broad chest, opened his mouth and rumbled out a deep growl. They were both panting, as if they'd run hard.

"Oh my _god_ ," Stiles whispered behind Laura. 

"You're in Hale territory, declare your pack and your intentions," she said, calm and implacable the way her mother had taught her. Something about being able to say that for the first time in her life, to stand on her family's ground and declare her claim to it, shot a spike of strength into her tired muscles. 

"Where is she?"

"...what?"

“ _Where is she_?”

Laura glanced behind her, quickly; Stiles and Lydia were still staring, apparently speechless. She figured it was up to her to ask the obvious question. “Where is who?”

“The girl,” the tall boy gasped out, through fangs that he didn’t seem to know how to retract. “The girl on the motorcycle.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap guys writing ensemble scenes is REALLY HARD. So many people in the room all having feelings and reactions, I have a new-found respect for the writers of TV shows with ensemble casts. I hope this turned out okay and not super boring and full of exposition. 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: gendered slur, ableist language, mentions of past canonical torture and assault, one character makes another uncomfortable by touching their arm without warning or permission. Also probably lots of typos.

It was a really uncomfortable ride back to Lydia’s house. The two werewolves in the back seat of Lydia’s car still looked very out of it, though Laura could hear their heartbeats stabilizing slowly, and Lydia’s hands were white-knuckled around the steering wheel.

They hadn’t had a chance to say much before they’d heard the sirens approaching in the distance, and most of what had been said had been sputterings of “Erica?? Boyd???? What…how…what…” from Stiles. These were the missing betas, apparently, a little feral around the edges but alive and well. Laura was surprised, and sad that she was surprised. She honestly hadn’t expected to find them alive.

She glanced at them in the rearview mirror again. They were holding hands, small bony pale fingers clasped between stronger dark ones, and they had both backseat windows open so that Erica’s hair whipped around in a golden cloud.

Stiles had gone to get Scott. Laura had stopped herself from telling him not to, and then wondered at the instinct. She wasn’t all that anxious to confront the kid that her uncle had mauled and turned, but it had to happen some time. Lydia had unequivocally stopped him from getting or even informing Derek, when made Laura’s teeth ache. She was trying to ignore how these kids talked about her brother, as if he was a liability to be managed.

“We have to find that girl,” Boyd’s voice spoke up from the back seat.

“We have to get away from the murder scene and whoever might be chasing you,” Lydia replied, very sharply. She was afraid of them, deeply so; Laura could smell it all around her.

“She saved us. She’s special.” Erica hadn’t been able to talk a few minutes ago, sunk too deep into the wolfy brain to manage it. Laura was impressed that she’d dragged herself back far enough to get those words out.

“And we’ll find her,” she promised, the distress of two lost betas too powerful to ignore. Laura might not be an alpha any more but she was always going to be an older sister, and reassurance was built into her bones. “As soon as we get you guys safe and you tell us what happened.”

“Ugh, of course you live in Beverly Beacon,” Erica groaned when they pulled up to Lydia’s house. “I am the opposite of surprised right now.” Sarcasm and the power of speech had both returned, apparently, though her voice was still weak.

“You’re also the opposite of human, sweetheart, get the fuck inside before someone sees your unibrow,” Lydia replied sweetly, and slammed the front door shut behind them.

“Okay, do you want to shower or—“ Laura hadn’t even gotten the sentence out before Erica and Boyd were in the kitchen, heads under the tap and gulping down water.

“Food,” Boyd pulled his face away briefly to gasp before diving back in. Laura concentrated, much harder than she would have had to if she had had her full power, and could smell the sour edge to their sweat. She strained and heard the thin tired pumping of their blood. Dehydration. Starvation. God, poor kids.

“Excuse—“ Lydia started. Laura put a hand on her arm to stop her, and pulled it back quickly when she jumped. Mistake. Don’t touch Lydia without notice and permission. Check, got it.

“I’m going to be a really rude guest and take things from your fridge without asking,” she announced, and pulled the door open while Lydia was still huffing in outrage. Processed meat, eh, maybe as a last resort, but somewhere in there was leaner meat, stuff that would go down easier on deprived stomachs…ah, jerky. Good. And chicken stock behind the tomatoes, even better.

Erica literally actually made a grab for the food when Laura pulled it out of the refrigerator, which was pretty hilarious.

“Don’t even try it,” Laura told her, teeth bared with good humor. “You wanna steal food from me you’ll have to do a lot better than that.” She poured the chicken stock into a bowl, microwaved it for thirty seconds, and soaked the jerky in it until it was soft.

“This should stay down as long as you don’t eat it fast. If you eat it fast, we’re all going to laugh at you when you puke,” she warned when she handed it over. Erica proceeded to immediately grab a handful and try to stuff it all into her mouth.

“Seriously, I’m just going to stand here and laugh,” Laura said, and left them to it.

The betas managed to fill their stomachs without throwing up on Lydia’s kitchen floor, and by the time they were done (Boyd looking very betrayed by how much his stomach capacity had shrunk) the front door was opening to admit Scott and Stiles.

Wow, now there was a weird scent. Laura tried to be subtle about looking Scott McCall over as she took another lungful, but probably didn’t manage it. He looked her over right back, and immediately gained several points with her by sizing her up as a possible threat instead of a pair of boobs in a jacket. He looked…wary and worn and still a little new around the edges, like his soul was tired and shiny-hopeful at the same time. He had a good feel to him, too, soft in a way new werewolves seldom were.

“I’m sorry about Peter,” she said, because that seemed the thing to do. He looked surprised.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I am—was—the Alpha. You got hurt in my territory with my power. I do owe you something, and we’ll talk about it more later,” she said. Scott looked very thoughtful about that, then nodded.

“They’re really okay?” he asked, and Lydia swept out an arm and showed him into the kitchen as if seating him for a dinner party.

“I think I have scurvy,” Erica was mumbling, slumped at the kitchen table and looking luminescent in the bright kitchen lights.

“Eat an orange.”

“Don’t wanna.”

“Mature.”

“Bite me.”

“Too late.”

“Maybe for—oh. Hey Batman. Nightwing.” Erica nodded at Scot and Stiles with what seemed to Laura to be forced casualness. Boyd just blinked at them.

“What, really, he’s Nightwing?” Stiles whined.

“Best ass in the group,” Erica said, as if that settled things, and Laura decided that that was a good note to get down to business on.

“SO. Sorry to do this at ugly-o’clock in the am, but we need to hear what happened with the Alpha Pack.”

Erica’s grin immediately faded. Boyd looked at Laura consideringly. “Sorry, I missed a plot point. Who exactly are you?”

“The Hale Alpha,” she answered, and she put enough belief behind it that she felt him respond, startled but accepting.

“That’s funny. We were under the impression it was someone else. And newsflash, we’re not in his club any more,” Erica said. She wasn’t at all moved, Laura noticed with interest. She didn’t have the same longing for pack that Boyd did, not in the same way.

“And I respect that. I consider you omegas with a legitimate claim to reside in Beacon Hills; you have my formal permission to move freely in my territory. If you are found to have violated our laws I claim the right to pass judgment; if you are threatened I grant the right to request an alliance. Are these terms agreeable?”

“Woah.” Stiles squinted at Laura, an expression that honestly looked a little alarming in its asymmetry. “That’s what I’m talking about! Finally we get a proper fantasy feel going on ‘round here. See, Scotty, this is what werewolf politics is supposed to be like, all ancient and badass-sounding.”

“We accept your terms,” Boyd said firmly, completely ignoring Stiles.

“Assuming have any ability to, like, enforce them.” Erica had a point. Laura just shrugged.

“We’ll see. So, please: what happened?”

Erica and Boyd glanced at each other. They looked very young for a moment, and then Erica firmed her chin determinedly and started talking.

“So, we were trying to run away from this entire shithole town when Allison and her psycho family…”

~

It was a pretty horrifying tale, all in all. Laura had been through some bad shit in her life, but she couldn’t even imagine escaping torture by hunters only to fall directly into the hands of the Alpha Pack.  She was also not so deeply absorbed in the story that she didn’t notice the reactions of the other kids around the table, which were fascinating. Stiles leaked guilt, he _radiated_ it, for reasons Laura couldn’t begin to divine since from what she could tell he hadn’t had any kind of hand in this whole mess. Scott did too, a hard kind of guilt that shone all metallic and blood-scented with responsibility. They had been hurt and he hadn’t saved them. Laura knew that feeling well. He also twitched whenever Erica insulted Allison, which was frequent. Clearly Laura wasn’t anywhere near understanding the clusterfuck that was the hunter presence in this town.

Lydia was trying her best not to look shellshocked and not quite succeeding. She looked like she’d tried to prepare herself for finding out the horrors happening in her little town, and was realizing she hadn’t quite prepared herself enough. Poor kid. All of them, why the hell were they the ones mixed up in this? Where were the adults who were supposed to be keeping them safe?

_Probably exactly where they were when they were supposed to be keeping you and Derek safe,_ Laura’s mind supplied.

“So we were in that vault, I don’t know how long,” Erica continued. “They would check on us sometimes, to see if we were ‘ready’ yet. And they were…they were doing something to us. It was like the full moon all the time. Worse, even. Like the full moon mixed with a bad dream mixed with total fucking rip-you-apart rage.

“And then she showed up.” Erica looked a little awed, a little thoughtful. “The girl. Our age, dark skin, long hair, doesn’t go to BHHS…I don’t know why she was looking for us or how she found us, but she knew our names. And it was like…she showed up and I could think again.” Boyd crossed his arms and nodded.

“Me too. I thought it was because the door was open.”

“I guess that could be it.” Erica didn’t sound convinced, but she shrugged and continued. “She broke the ash line, and we ran. We got almost all the way to the door, and then Kali and Ms. Morrell were there.”

“Ms. Morrell?” Laura glanced at Lydia for an explanation, and blinked at how furious she suddenly looked.

“I knew it! God, I knew it, I said she was creepy didn’t I? ‘What does this look like Lydia, I use antiquated methods based in flawed psychoanalytic theory Lydia, I’m going to interrogate you from a deeply unequal position of power Lydia’…that werewolf _bitch_!”

“Uh, woah there.” Stiles edged away from Lydia as if her rage might have a blast radius. Laura wasn’t sure it didn’t. “Wait, seriously though, what the hell?! I told her some really personal things!”

“She’s not a werewolf. She was like, magic or something; she and the girl had a wizard’s duel, there were flashing blue lights and everything,” Erica cut in. Lydia’s eyes widened and she shut her mouth with a shocked and angry snap.

“A wizard’s duel?” Boyd raised an eyebrow skeptically.

“What, I read Harry Potter, fuck you you know I’m right.”

“Maybe, but…” He trailed off.

“But what?”

“But, obviously, we’ve overlooked something major because the Alpha pack has a wizard on their side who teaches at our school! I have to see her in French class on Tuesday!” Lydia exclaimed.

“You might want to drop French,” Scott suggested.

“This isn’t _funny_ , McCall!”

“I didn’t say it was, I just—”

“Okay, stop, enough.” Laura judged it was time to cut in, and put on her most unimpressed face when Lydia and Scott both glowered at her. “We have to focus on one thing at a time, let’s finish this story and come back to the guidance counselor issue.”

“Sure.” Scott flashed her that adorable crooked smile and settled back. Lydia’s glare intensified.

“Uh, no. This group’s record on keeping track of things they need to come back to later is not impressive.”

“She’s got a point.”

“Don’t be a suck-up Stiles, I have a point with or without you agreeing.”

Stiles gaped in outrage; Laura stifled the laugh trying to rise in her throat before it could show on her face.

“I understand that, but either way we have to leave one topic for later, and we need to hear the rest of Erica and Boyd’s story. We’re going to deal with that first, and then we can address implications of anything they tell us. But right now, Boyd was going to say something. ”

Lydia’s expression shifted in a way Laura hadn’t seen before, mouth open slightly before she pressed her lips together, hard. She was hurt, Laura realized a moment too late. She’d felt dismissed. It was Laura’s job to be her ally, that was what they’d agreed, and Lydia felt like she’d been told her concern wasn’t important. Fuck shit goddamn.

Boyd opened his mouth to continue. “Wait!” Laura yelped, and he shut it again with a distinctly judgment-filled expression. “Sorry. Just…Lydia, correct me if I’m wrong— ”

“Don’t worry, she will,” Erica muttered.

“—but you seem like a girl who can multi-task. Can you both listen to this story and get some notes down on what this magical guidance counselor might know and what we know about her? That’ll make the later discussion easier.”

She’d managed to surprise Lydia again; Laura could tell because of the way her eyes widened. She looked very still and careful for a moment, as if she was about to test her weight on uncertain ground, and then it vanished in a toss of her hair.

“If I couldn’t listen to one thing and take notes on another I’m not sure how I would have gotten through first year biology.”

“Mobile games and an easily-concealed smartphone,” Stiles advised wisely with his weirdly wide smile, then squawked as Lydia shoved him out of the way to get at her computer. She opened it up and glanced at Boyd.

“Continue,” she ordered regally. Laura rolled her eyes and tried not to grin.

“Since you asked so nicely.” Boyd drummed his fingers on the table. “Erica, you said they had a duel. This is going to sound weird, but I don’t think they were really fighting.”

“Uh, did you miss how Ms. Morrell tried to eat that girl’s ankles with a shadow snake and the girl made a big white monster out of fog that threw her into a wall? That was fighting, Boyd, not _foreplay_.” Erica lingered silkily on the word foreplay, and smiled when she got a blush out of Stiles.

“I think they were faking it.” Erica blinked, the smile slipping off her face. “There’s a difference between being thrown and jumping. I’m pretty sure Ms. Morrell threw herself into that wall. Did you notice how she did it in a way so that she blocked Kali’s path to us? She was letting us get away.”

“So they were working together?” Laura asked.

“I think so. I don’t know if they knew each other or not, though.”

“Did they smell related?” At Boyd and Erica’s blank looks, Laura sighed. “Right. Well if we find this girl, we’ll ask her. What happened next?”

“She had a bike stashed outside, but it wasn’t big enough for all of us to ride. Boyd tried to be an asshole and make me ride it even though I’m faster.” Erica shot him a look that was simultaneously annoyed and affectionate. “Then the twins literally burst through the door, shirtless which you’d think would be hot but actually really wasn’t. We ran, obviously, with her on the bike. Doublemint Creepy almost caught up to us, then the girl yelled something and it was like we ran straight into a fog. I couldn’t smell or hear or see anything.”

“It was much thicker than normal cloud,” Boyd agreed. “I could barely hear your heartbeat, and you were right next to me.” 

“So we grabbed each other and just…kept running.” Erica bit her lip. “And when we got out of the fog, the twins weren’t there, but neither was she. That’s when we heard the scream.”

“You thought it was the girl?”

“No.” Boyd shook his head decisively. “We knew it was Lydia.”

“Uh, you barely know me,” Lydia reminded him.

“Yeah, we’ve been lucky that way.” Erica’s innocent tone was a sure sign she was making trouble, Laura was beginning to learn.

“Oh-kay, hey, what time is it?” Laura broke in before that conversation could get any farther.

“Uh.” Stiles, warily watching how Lydia and Erica were eyeing each other, fumbled his phone out of his pocket and dropped it. “Shit, hold on, just a sec…” He bent down, picked it up, then immediately flailed and dropped it again as the alarm went off.

“Wow, buddy, before your morning caffeine even?” Scott bent in a fluid motion, turned off the alarm, and bypassed the step of handing the phone back to Stiles in favor of just putting it directly into his pocket. “Deep breaths bro.”

“Fuck you Scott. It’s seven a.m., Scary Hale Lady.”

“Aw, you flatterer.” Laura smiled at him, bright and full of teeth, and admitted privately that she got a little thrill of delight when his pulse kicked up. “All right. No one here is going to school today, obviously, so five-minute break to call home, make excuses, whatever. Then we’re talking about Ms. Morrell until we have all the information possible. And then we're going to try to find this girl. And then we're going to sleep.”

Everyone nodded.

“I’m calling Allison,” Lydia announced, and it took exactly three seconds for everyone in the room to be shouting. Except Boyd and Laura, who very slowly exchanged a look of meaningful camaraderie.

“Awesome,” Laura sighed, and leaned back and left them to it. Her teambuilding textbook had said that sometimes people needed to release bottled feelings on deeply contentious issues before initiating productive discussion.  


	5. Chapter 5

The screaming match resolved with Allison not called, Erica triumphant, Scott deeply sad, and Lydia furious. Laura was trying to file away all of the information gained there for future reference when Erica sauntered up to her with an extremely unconvincing faux-innocent expression and said sweetly,

“Miss Alpha? My parents think I’m dead so I need you to call me out of school.”

“Oh my god. I might upchuck on your shoes.” Laura gagged a little bit. “Don’t ever talk to me like I’m your mom again or I’ll kick your ass.”

“Upchuck? Oh, woah, the nineties, I hear those were good times.” Stiles grinned his goofy half-smile when she glared at him. Giggles broke out all over the room, and Laura gave up.

“Yeah, I’m like ten years older than all of you, I get it, it’s funny, I’ll let you know when I break a hip. Erica? The school thinks you’re dead too, sit your cute-but-extremely-annoying butt down. Stiles? Shut your face or I’m going to write Spice Girls lyrics on your car with my claws. Lydia, stop calling Allison while you think we’re distracted, you guys agreed that you wouldn’t. So help me, we’re going to discuss your creepy French teacher so I can go to sleep.”

“Don’t make me turn this car around,” Scott muttered, and they all cracked up again. Even Boyd was laughing, and it lightened up the heavy evergreen-raincloud of his scent so much that Laura couldn’t even be mad.

The eventual summit of information-gathering on Ms. No-One-Knows-Her-First-Name Morrell turned up the following facts:

  1. She was creepy and she did this thing where she stared right at you without blinking and it looked like her eyeshadow was judging you.
  2. She was Canadian. (“I knew it!” “Shut up Stiles.”)
  3. Stiles thought she was actually a pretty decent guidance counselor; Lydia disagreed vehemently and acidly.
  4. Boyd thought she was working with the motorcycle girl.
  5. Erica thought she was working with the Alpha Pack.
  6. They both thought she wasn’t a werewolf.
  7. She had the ability to make things out of shadows, or move shadows, or make it look like shadows were moving. Erica and Boyd were a little unclear on what exactly had been happening there.
  8. She’d known something about Peter’s resurrection before it happened. (“Like what?” “Enough to help but she didn’t,” Lydia said flatly, and no one was willing to ask her anything else about it.)



They were winding down the usefulness of the session—Stiles had started making suggestions like “Her hair holds secrets” so probably they were done—when Scott frowned and said slowly,

“You, uh, you were saying how people can smell related?”

“Sure.”

“…I think Ms. Morrell and Deaton might be related.”

“Your _boss_?”

Laura felt something shiver in her veins, like her pack-sense but more remote. Deaton. She’d never heard that name before in her life, so why did it feel like…

“Tell me about him.” Her voice came out too strident, too hard, the Alpha Voice in a situation that didn’t call for it. Immediately she sensed Scott’s hackles going up.

“He’s a good guy.”

Laura bit her tongue on an order, and bit her cheek to stop her teeth from baring. _Calm the fuck down_ , she ordered her instincts. _You’re not helping right now._

“I believe you. My ‘this is important’ voice sounds like my ‘I’m going to rip your throat out’ voice sometimes, probably because I’m an asshole. I have no reason to suspect him of anything, Scott, I just need to know more about him.”

Scott just looked at her, stubborn and suspicious. He really cared about this man, Laura realized.

“He runs the animal clinic. He knows things but never tells us anything about anything. He’s got things like mountain ash in his office.” Stiles shrugged when Scott glared at him. “You’re always saying the problem is that no one trusts anyone or tells anyone anything, Scott. You really think she’s going to go all ‘rawr I’m bad at solving problems so I’ll hit them instead’ on him like Derek did?”

“Derek did _what_?” Ooh, and there was the Angry Alpha Voice. Fear flashed into the room, sharp and cold from Lydia, red and bruised from Boyd and Erica, pale and skittery from Stiles. None from Scott. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“No, he shouldn’t have.”

Scott wasn’t scared, he was angry. Laura took a deep breath, in and out, and then another. “We’re going to talk about that, later. Stiles, have you ever seen Deaton do anything like the magic Ms. Morrell and the girl did?”

“No. He knows stuff about plants and gods and things, though.”

“Gods?”

“Like that one he told us about, Scott. Kara…Cera…Care Bear.”

“Cernunnos.”

“Sure.”

Knowledge exploded into Laura’s mind, so suddenly and strongly that she stumbled back a step. Someone’s hand on her elbow kept her from falling forward, but she couldn’t see who it was through the memory in front of her eyes.

“Laura,” her mother said, the lines around her eyes more pronounced than she had ever seen them. “I’m going to have to tell you some things a little bit ahead of schedule.”

Something had happened that day while Laura was at school. She’d felt a strange shiver in her web of pack-sense, like someone had tugged hard on an outlying thread. During lunch she’d found Derek throwing up in the boy’s bathroom; “My stomach’s all…sideways,” he’d said, angry about it. She’d sent him home and gone through the rest of the day on high alert; Derek was sensitive to the pack structure, much more than she was, and it was only more confirmation that something important had changed.

Now her mother was talking to her after dinner, very serious and smelling very sad.

“You remember druid stories, from when you were young.”

“Sure.”

“Remember how you asked where they were now, and we said we’d tell you when you were older?”

“I’m older?” Laura guessed, and Talia smiled.

“Well you seem to be able to have a fight with your brother without changing and biting his nose, so…”

“Oh my _god_ , mom, let it go already!”

“Never.” Her smiled faded and Laura was worried. “Druids are much more scattered than they used to be. They don’t work together as much any more, but some of them…choose to work with us. They bind themselves to the pack.”

“And they help us?”

“They advise the Alphas. They call themselves Emissaries, and they’re here to provide knowledge and history that we might not have on our own.”

“Well, cool. Do we have one?”

“We did, until today.” Her mother looked so sad that Laura was expecting her to say their Emissary had died. “He and I made a mistake. We created a monster, together. And we thought we might be able to put it behind us, but now…”

With horror, Laura realized her mother was trying not to cry. “Mom, just tell me. Tell me, I’m old enough to know, I’ll help! If there’s a monster, I’ll _kill_ it!”

“Oh, Laura. Sometimes it doesn’t work like that. I don’t know who could kill him, now. Not now that he’s…" Talia took a deep breath and let it out again. "Deucalion has convinced Kali to kill her whole pack, including her Emissary. And Alan…he believes it’s our fault. He said that it’s too much, that he no longer trusts us to make decisions together. He broke his bond to our pack.”

“That’s why Derek’s sick.”

“He feels things very strongly. When you’re Alpha you’ll need to tend the pack bonds carefully, for everyone but especially for him.”

“I know. Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Can we get another Emissary?”

“No. We’ll have to do without, from now on. It won’t be easy.”

Laura growled. “He’s a coward. He left you to deal with it on your own.”

“He’s doing what he thinks is right. And now I need to do something you won’t like. Only the Alpha and her mate should know the name of the Emissary; it’s part of our bargain with them, to keep them safe. So I’m going to hide this conversation from you, and when you’re Alpha I’ll bring it back.”

“Aw, mom, _again_? All this buried knowledge stuff makes me feel like my brain is a computer game.”

“Considering how much time you spend on that computer, you’re welcome. Neck please.”

“Yeah yeah, technology is rotting the minds of our children, when I was your age I made my own fun, kids these days never howl at the moon any more—ow!”

“Shush you. The key word is Cernunnos.”

Her eyes cleared, and ached a little with the sharpness of the fluorescent lights. Someone was steadying her, slim hands on her arm and the small of her back; Lydia.

“Dude, you broke her,” Stiles was saying, and Erica snarled at him, wordlessly defensive. Laura liked that, that she’d jump in to defend Laura even with no pack connection between them. That was nice.

“How long was I out?” Laura muttered, and at her side she felt Lydia relax in relief.

“Two and a half minutes, give or take however long before we noticed.”

“Oh good.” Laura shook herself a little. She noted and cataloged the sick ache that was starting to build back up in her abdomen, like period cramps but with deeper, sharper edge to it, and then ignored it. Her mom had tied that information into that keyword for a reason—Deaton must be the Emissary she was talking about. And if Morrell was related to him, well, Talia had definitely made it seem like this was the sort of thing that ran in families.

“Are you okay?” There was real concern to Scott’s tone, even though he’d known her all of five hours. Laura was really starting to like this kid.

“I’m fine, thanks. Back from mystic werewolf vision, here to impart knowledge and then take one hell of a nap.”

“Mystic werewolf vision?” Boyd wasn’t buying it. Erica wasn’t either, but she seemed delighted at the lie at least.

“I knew psychic powers were going to be part of the deal eventually! So? Impart.”

“I think Ms. Morrell might be a druid. And I think that, even though she isn’t a werewolf, she might be part of a pack.”

Stiles shook his head. “There aren’t any other packs around here. Are there? Except the Alpha Pack, but obviously she can’t be part of them.”

“Why not?”

“Uh, because….” Stiles appeared to realize he didn’t have a response, and continued weakly, “that would….really suck…?”

“Well spotted.” Lydia put in acidly from Laura’s side. “So, she’s evil. Told you so.”

“Then why did she help us get away?” Boyd reminded her.

“We only have your interpretation of the events to say she even did,” Lydia shot back, and Erica instantly bristled.

“He says that’s what happened, it’s what happened, okay?”

“Forgive me if I’m not overwhelmed by your evidence, sweetheart.”

“Forgive me if I’m not up for this condescending bullshit from you in your running mascara, _sweetheart_ —“

“We need next steps,” Laura broke in before they could really get started. Obviously the blowup between Erica and Lydia was going to happen some time, but she would really rather it not be now. “She was there when you got free so she must know something. She might be an enemy, she might not be; right now she’s an unknown, and that’s even worse. We need to figure out what her deal is, and if we do, I bet that will get us to finding that girl. That was really important to you guys, right?”

“It was. It is,” Boyd cut in firmly. “How do we find out what she wants?”

Laura thought about it for a moment, then grinned. “I figure I’ll walk into her office and ask her.”

There was stunned silence in the room for a long moment.

“Oh my god, she’s worse than Derek,” Stiles moaned. Laura decided she was going to take that as a compliment.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wonder of wonders, this story is not dead! I think I have enough distance from Teen Wolf The Actual Show now to see clearly again what I want to write and how I want this to go. Apologies to anyone who was invested in this and presumably lost hope over the more than a year it went un-updated. Laura Hale is still my forever girl despite never appearing in the actual TV show as a living character.

All Laura really wanted to do was sleep for a week, but she was starting to get the sense for the rhythm of life in Beacon Hills right now, and it was frantic. She probably should have inferred that from Lydia’s note that they were under attack by three separate forces—hunters and the Alpha Pack, shit, had they even gotten to talking about the third one yet??—but she was feeling it now. The sense that if she stopped running her enemies were right behind, and if she closed her eyes for a moment, she was going to wake up surrounded.

How depressingly familiar.

So instead of getting to go take a nap, Laura had to prepare to face down an unknown Emissary. As a Beta. Having been dead less than eighteen hours ago.

Everyone else in Lydia’s house had fallen asleep in the living room before noon, Boyd and Erica in an exhausted tangle on the couch. Laura took the time until school let out to try to speed up her healing abilities with the age-old mystical werewolf method known as ‘mainlining coffee’, then jogged over to the high school and lurked like a creeper at the edges of the parking lot until most of the students cleared off to sports or home or benign delinquency. The guidance counselor’s office was just where she remembered it to be; Laura knocked on the door and popped her claws behind her back in case the Alpha Pack Emissary came out swinging. 

Marin Delacroix opened the door. Her hair was straight now, not braided like it had been in high school, but she smelled exactly the same, and she took one look at Laura and slapped a hand onto the door as if she needed help to stay upright.

“Laura?!”

“ _Marin_?”

They gaped at each other, or as close as Marin ever got to gaping which was a widening of her impeccably outlined eyes. Laura’s mouth was hanging open and she didn’t feel at all bad about it. Of all the threats she’d expected to face, she hadn’t really bet on the “ex-girlfriend” angle.

“You’re alive.”

“You’re…where do I even, uh, start. Back in the country. Going by a different last name. Rescuing teenage werewolves from the Alpha Pack. And a guidance counselor?”

Laura felt a little like she’d gone through a time warp. Part of it was standing in Beacon Hills High School with this woman in front of her; it felt like any minute Marin would kiss her cheek and swan off to math class, and Beth and Kody would come around the corner to drag a protesting Laura to chemistry. But the rest of it was just…them, the way she could chart emotions across Marin’s face like the movement of the stars, the way her scent was sinking into Laura’s bones and making her feel like her heart was trying to reboot to a time when that smell had meant home.

“Please tell me you’re not working with the Alpha Pack. I don’t know if I could hurt you,” she blurted out, unplanned.

“I am working with the Alpha Pack. And I don’t want to hurt you, either.” That was Marin. Never one to make things easier.

“Why? Marin you know what they are. What Deucalion is.”

“We go where we’re assigned, Laura. It’s not a choice.”

“Fuck.” That made too much sense, really. Of course some kind of body would place Emissaries with packs. Of course Emissaries would have to answer to a higher power, the way packs answered to an Alpha.

“So you’re…what? Hanging out with them hoping you can stop them before they kill anyone?”

“Something like that.” Marin had her inscrutable face on. It was just as annoying as it had been when they were dating. Laura ground her teeth.

“And you wouldn’t know anything about a girl on a bike who saved two unaffiliated betas last night.”

Marin smiled, thinly. Laura’s heart gave an unexpected, funny little kick of confused familiarity.

“Sounds like an upstanding citizen.”

“Yeah I’m sure. You’re not going to tell me where she is, are you.”

“If I knew that kind of person, her whereabouts would be her own business...so much so that she wouldn’t have told me.”

“And you can’t tell me anything about why the Alpha Pack is here or what their plans are.”

“There are things about being an Emissary that no one can circumvent.”

“That sucks,” Laura grumbled, then felt compelled to add, “but it’s not your fault.” She took a deep breath, shook her head a little to clear it from the buzz of tiredness and emotional upheaval, and focused.

“But come on Marin, whatever their overblown, Shakespeare-villain-y reason for being here is, that’s not your deal. I know you. Why are _you_ in Beacon Hills?”

Marin had had this same core of stillness even back in high school. Looking into her eyes was like trying to stare down a pool of water; ineffective, but you came out of it feeling oddly calm. Laura let herself feel a little of that old connection—it was hard not to, practically standing where they had first met.

Finally Marin cracked. She slid her sphinx-smile into something a lot more dangerous, something that reached her eyes.

“I’m here because a mongrel killed my ex-girlfriend, and despite her somehow managing to come back from it, I’m going to turn him into a hearth rug.”

Laura felt her mouth drop open. Of all the possible reasons, she hadn’t been expecting that.

“You…Marin, seriously? For me?” To her dismay, she felt tears prickling in her eyes. It was such a weird thing to be so touched by, the knowledge that someone had wanted to avenge her death, but it reached right inside her into the place that worried no one would care if she was gone. “God, really?”

“Of course.” Marin reached out and laid one graceful hand on Laura’s wrist, and she felt it bloom through her, up her arm and into her chest. “I still care about you, Laura.”

“I do…I…me too.” And here they were, Marin flawless and Laura a mumbling teary mess, exactly like the last time they’d seen each other.

“I’m making you cry in the hallway again.”

“I know, seriously, it’s like your hobby.” Laura choked out a watery laugh. “Me and feelings, you know, not my strong point.”

“I know.” Marin squeezed Laura’s wrist once and let go again. She felt the warmth of her fingers leave, and it didn’t hurt as badly as she thought it might have. Maybe that was how you knew you were over someone, or over them enough at least; when their leaving just hurt, instead of destroyed. Laura took a slow, cleansing breath and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“It means a lot to me that you cared enough to come here for me. It really does. And don’t take this the wrong way…but why else are you here?” Marin’s eyes flickered, that half-blink she used to try to hide surprise. “I know you, remember? You always have another angle, and don’t think I don’t appreciate that, but I need to know it.”

Marin sighed, but she didn’t look too put out. Laura got the sense that she appreciated having someone around who at least knew enough to bother ferreting out all her genius plots.

“I’m interviewing candidates.”

“For?”

“A coven.”

For a minute Laura genuinely thought she’d said ‘oven’, which left her bewildered and kind of disturbed, but then vague knowledge from one of Derek’s research projects kicked at her and she realized.

“What, like a witch book club?”

“Sure, if you want to put it in the most charmingly juvenile way possible.” Marin rolled her eyes, which Laura counted as a victory because she loved exasperating people with her lack of class.

“I thought druids didn’t do that stuff any more.”

“Mm-hm.” Marin sort of half-smiled inscrutably, which was obnoxious but fair enough. Laura wasn’t up on all the current druid politics and didn’t need to be.

“Is this gonna be a Beacon Hills outfit?”

“No, I want to go back to Vancouver once I find who I’m looking for.”

“So why come here to interview?”

“…must you always ask the inconvenient question?”

“Must you always _avoid_ the question?” Marin was not used to losing verbal sparring matches any more; her lips twitched, amused and annoyed. Laura grinned. Marin sighed.

“Beacon Hills is…unique. There’s a level of ambient power here that makes for good prospects in the children born here.”

“Huh.” Laura hadn’t known anything about this. “This isn’t a Hellmouth situation, is it? Is this ‘ambient power’ going to spew demons into my territory?”

“The Nemeton is dormant.”

“That told me…absolutely nothing.”

“Crack a book every once in a while.” Laura stuck her tongue out, delighted she’d managed to get Marin to the point of personal insults.

“So who are you…” Laura broke off as she remembered the two people in Lydia’s friend group who had had the most to say about ‘Ms. Morrell’. “Stiles and Lydia.”

“Two more as well; named Danielle and Danny, amusingly.”

_No. MINE._ Laura couldn’t breathe for a moment through the rush of fury and subsequent terror. She didn’t move, thankfully, knew better than to let her body do anything but freeze when in the grip of territorial instincts, but the fact that her blood was pounding in her ears and her fangs wanted to drop was a disaster. She’d known two teenagers less than a day and she felt like she had a _claim_ on them? That was fucked up. That was not okay. And yet the words were pushing at her lips, trying to get out:

_You can’t take them. They’re mine._

Wow, this was so bad.

_Ally is not the same as pack. Ally is not the same as pack. Ally is not the same as pack and YOU’RE NOT ALPHA ANY MORE._ She repeated it in her head until she felt under control again. Marin let her, though Laura knew she was watching and speculating.

“I need you to hold off on Lydia and Stiles until we get our situation sorted out,” she said at last, when she was confident it could come out without a growl.

“Done. In return I want you to take Danielle and Danny under your protection; candidates like them draw danger in a town like this.”

Laura only had to think about it for a minute. Teenagers were in danger, what was she supposed to do, _not_ protect them? “Done. Point them out to me and I’ll talk to them within a day.”

“Danielle has a girlfriend. Heather.”

“Yes, fine, okay, her too. God Marin at this rate I’ll have the whole high school hiding behind me.”

“Again.” Marin smiled, the real one that meant she was laughing inside. Laura grinned.

“That was one time and my mom” ouch ouch ouch move on don’t let it linger “took care of it.”

They both sobered.

“I’m sorry. About Talia and Cora and everyone. I wish I’d been here,” Marin said. Laura bit her lip against the tangle of feelings trying to choke her.

“I wish you had too.”

She left after Marin had found a yearbook and pointed out Danielle and Danny to her. She’d wanted to get some kind of promise out of her about warning them before the Alpha Pack did anything, but had reconsidered before asking—that might put Marin in a really dangerous position, or be asking her to break her Emissary rules, which was probably pretty dangerous as well. They’d manage without her inside info.

On the jog back to Lydia’s house, she tried to remember anything her mom had told her about druids in those stories from when she was a kid. They tended to be the _deus ex machina_ of the plot, or really more often the _deus ex sophia_ ; when you needed to know something, you went to the druid. Sharing information was definitely not Marin’s strong point; Laura wondered if her half-brother, Alan (Alan _Deaton_ , obviously, things were coming together and shedding a whole new light on Talia’s wariness back when Laura had first started dating Marin), was any different. It might be time to find out.

By the time she got back to the house, she had the beginnings of a plan on what to do next. But it depended on several factors, including the unpredictable variable of how able to track a scent Erica and Boyd were.

Laura let herself into the house to find a living room covered in sprawled, snoring teens. Someone, probably Lydia, had gone to the trouble of making it look like a slumber party; there were DVD cases scattered over the table and a bunch of junk food dropped haphazardly by the couch. At first glance no one would notice that the food wasn’t open and their sleep was the sleep of the truly exhausted, the hunted not the satisfied. That was sad, Laura thought resignedly. She wished it really had been a slumber party: that all these kids had to worry about in life was if Lydia’s mom would come home and catch them skipping school.

She woke Scott first. Sometimes her instincts told her to do things without her knowing why, and she’d done it before she even really thought about it. He came awake fearfully but not panicked, which was good she supposed. Once he was awake, she realized why she’d done it this way.

“Can we talk?” she asked quietly, and he blinked at her with heartbreakingly guileless confusion. “About Allison.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet you thought you'd seen the last of this story, huh? Nope, it's still kicking. Also I swear the entire story is not just people having conversations in Lydia's house??

Laura got Scott set up in the kitchen with a mug of hot cocoa before she asked him about Allison. She couldn’t help it: big sisterhood wasn’t just a personality trait, for a while it was the only thing she really knew for sure about herself. For even longer it was the only part of herself she was sure she liked.

“I’m asking you about Allison for a couple of reasons,” she said, and watched his hands tighten on the mug. “First, because she’s an Argent living in my territory and that’s extremely dangerous for me, so I need to know what’s going on and how it got that way. Second, because you kind of look like you need to talk about it with someone. And third, because you’re a werewolf who isn’t at all scared of a hunter, and that’s fascinating to me.”

“Allison isn’t a hunter.”

“No? Help me understand, then.”

Scott tried. In fact it seemed like he’d practiced this, a little bit: like he’d been waiting for someone to ask him about Allison who didn’t already think they knew the whole story. He told her that the first time he’d ever seen her it was like a ringing in his ears, like he’d gone underwater and never wanted to come up. That somehow, incredibly, he’d made her smile sometimes; that even more incredibly, she’d wanted to tell him things, precious, important things about herself and her thoughts and feelings. That because of that he wasn’t just guessing when he told her who Allison was as a person; he knew. He knew Allison was kind, and brave, and smart. He knew that she would never, not for a second, judge anyone by what they were instead of what they’d done. He said that she had been lied to, a lot, his voice cracking when he admitted how many of those times were by him. He said that Kate Argent didn’t deserve Allison’s love but she’d had it and it wasn’t fair that someone like her had been able to hurt her by leaving.

He didn’t specify to Laura what exactly Allison had done that he was trying so hard to explain wasn’t her fault. She could read between the lines there, though. Boyd and Erica's story had been detailed. 

It took about ten minutes for Laura to realize that Scott thought he was pleading for Allison’s life. He thought Laura was going to kill the Argents, and she’d asked him why she should spare this one.

That realization came as Scott was stumbling over an explanation of who Victoria Argent was, how she tried to kill him and he didn’t remember clearly what happened after but it ended up with her dead by Derek’s hand. The news that Derek had killed an Argent matriarch was probably the scariest thing Laura had ever heard, and the fact that he’d survived the fallout so far was only marginally reassuring. Hunters didn’t exactly need excuses for their genocide, but Victoria Argent dying by a Hale alpha was a hell of a rallying cry.

Laura felt a little like her throat was trying to close up. She’d read Lydia’s spreadsheet, she’d known already that Kate, Victoria and Gerard Argent were all dead and that there was an uneasy truce between hunters and werewolves in Beacon Hills. She hadn’t known that, if they wanted, the Argents were within their rights to demand Derek’s head. She certainly hadn’t known that this truce rested on the goodwill of a traumatized teenager and her unpredictable father.

She had to stop this before it could go any farther. The alpha pack...they were a short-term problem, big and in her face. Hunters were always, always the threat you never saw coming. The Hale family had learned that in the fire.

“I want you to come with me when we talk to the Argents,” she said, when Scott seemed to have run out of words. He gaped at her, kind of adorably. She wasn’t sure what was blowing his mind so much about that, the fact that she was going to talk to them instead of biting their faces off or the fact that she was asking him along. Either way it was a good sign. For this to work, she had to be unlike any other approach the Argents had seen so far.

“I want to change the conversation between us and them.” _Well, no, I want this done with, once and for all. I want them to go away and never come back. I want them all to die. I want them to stop hurting us. As if powerful people ever just decide to stop. _ “And I think you can help me do that. I’m going to bring Lydia too, but no one else. Is that okay?”

“What does that mean, change the conversation?” Scott looked suspicious of the vague phrasing, and Laura was opening her mouth to respond when voices from the next room stopped her. Stiles apparently went from ‘sound asleep and snoring’ to ‘awake and freaking out that he can’t find Scott’ in about two seconds flat.

“He’s in here!” she called, and the whole mess of teenagers tumbled into the room. Their levels of sleep-rumpled ranged from Stiles on the “couch fabric print covering half his face” end of the spectrum to Lydia at the opposite “I apparently did my hair and makeup in the two seconds since I woke up” polar extreme.

“Morning sunshine,” Laura greeted Erica’s massive yawn cheerfully.

“Afternoon, fuckface,” Erica muttered back. Laura and Scott both snorted with laughter.

“I need to take a quick poll,” she announced. “None of you went to school today. How much class can you skip before it starts fucking things up for you? Because class is basically the least useful place you can be right now.”

“You’re a terrible authority figure,” Boyd informed her.

“Yes, it’s part of my charm. So?”

“I don’t need to attend class.” Lydia laid it out there baldly, and with less triumph than Laura might have expected. She raised her chin in an oddly defensive move when everyone stared at her, and that didn’t make sense to Laura. What did she have to be defensive about in admitting she was academically brilliant?

“Do you need to exaggerate literally every time you open your mouth—“ Erica started, and Lydia’s pulse kicked up. She was scared. This was so interesting.

“I’m not. I’m more than capable of graduating whenever I want to.”

That silenced everyone. Lydia’s fear and Stiles’ arousal were mixing in the air and making Laura sick to her stomach.

“We’re still missing, and we’re gonna have to repeat the semester at this rate anyways. Might as well stay missing,” Boyd said into the silence. Laura liked how he chose these moments to say the helpful thing and re-focus the group, that was fucking useful.

“Werewolf gap year!” Erica agreed, punching the air.

“How will that work with your home situations?” Laura had to ask, and Boyd suddenly looked sick.

“I have to—” He stumbled to his feet and lunged at the phone on the kitchen wall. Laura almost didn’t get to the receiver ahead of his grasping fingers, which would have been kind of a disaster. He stopped short of snatching it out of her hand, but it was a near thing, and it wasn’t because he didn’t want to. Boyd held himself back from physical contact with other people with a level of vigilance even higher than Laura’s own, which she could make some guesses about the reasons for but preferred not to just yet. His hand reached out, then fell back to his side and clenched into a fist.

“I have to call them. I’m _missing_ ,” Boyd hissed at her, eyes flashing gold with a distress she didn’t understand.

“Give me one day. One day to figure out how to play this,” she said, making her voice come out hard and confident. “24 hours and then you can let them know you’re safe.”

It was, somehow, the right thing to say. He backed down, pushed his clenched fist into his thigh in a tight, controlled motion that was practiced in its subduedness. This was a boy whose art was being non-threatening, she was realizing.

“Erica? How about you?”

“I left a note the day I turned and haven’t been back since.”

Now it was Erica’s turn to have everyone stare at her, and she lifted her chin in an amazing mimic of Lydia.

“I couldn’t exactly explain why I don’t seize any more. They think I’m staying with a boyfriend and they’re ‘giving me my space.’ I email once a month.”

“Except you missed the last three months,” Stiles pointed out. Laura winced. He was like the anti-Boyd, he said useful things but right when it was least helpful. Erica bared her teeth, eyes shining, and didn’t answer. Laura made an executive decision that it was time to move the conversation to a new topic.

“Boyd said he wants to repeat this semester, assuming enough of Beacon Hills is still standing after this whole mess. Erica, you down with that too?”

“What, do you want my top three college choices too?” When Erica’s back was up anyone was a threat and therefore a target, Laura noted.

“Well as the only person in the room who has graduated college I’m happy to give my input, sure. But set phasers to stun, okay, I’m not saying you have to go back to school—“

“—seriously, worst authority figure ever—“

“—just that you’re gonna have to plan for it if you do. Getting your GED is also an option, as is deciding you only want a career in the supernatural sector; they care less about traditional education there.”

“There’s a supernatural sector?” Stiles made a little flaily motion that seemed to indicate delight. “I’m finally hanging out with people who say things like ‘careers in the supernatural sector’, this is amazing, where have you been all my life?” He paused. “Other than, y’know, dead for the last year. Awkward.”

“Right.” Laura was just going to let that one go. “Erica, I’m gonna have you email your folks and apologize for being out of touch. Say you broke up with your boyfriend but now you’re staying with a different friend, someone from school. Unless,” Something occurred to her and she glanced between Boyd and Erica. “Was Boyd the boyfriend you were talking about?” That would complicate things.

For the first time Erica looked bashful. “No. He…no,” she mumbled. Boyd shifted in his chair a little so their shoulders bumped together, companionably, and her cheeks turned a little pink.

“Adorable. Okay, if they ask who the friend is give them Lydia’s name, I’m correct in thinking your family’s pretty high in social capital around here?” Lydia nodded. “Yeah. So that will reassure them that you’re not, you know, living under a bridge.”

“We’re staying _here_?” Erica made a face as if Lydia’s palatial house was some kind of punishment.

“That was my next question. Lydia, do you think your name is disconnected enough from Derek’s pack that the alphas won’t think to look here?”

“I can think of five people able to connect us who aren’t already in this room.”

“Acceptable. Okay, that seems like the less risky plan, we’re going with it.”

Lydia coughed politely. “Yes, of course, you’re welcome to invite random werewolves into my home, thank you so much for asking.”

Laura opened her mouth to retort, blinked, and closed it again. What had she been about to say? This was, indisputably, Lydia’s house. Commandeering her guest rooms wasn’t even close to within Laura’s rights as local Alpha, not to mention the fact that she wasn’t actually the alpha right now. She missed Derek suddenly, sharply and fiercely; if he’d been here she could have just shrugged and laughed, because he understood how sometimes being a little lost wolf in a big world led one’s instincts to latch onto whatever territory was on offer.

“I apologize,” she said instead. “Lydia, how do you feel about—“

“You already invited them, you can’t backtrack and ask permission _now_ ,” Lydia said with an expressive roll of her eyes.

Brat. “So can they stay or not?”

“Obviously. My mother is home Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, if you let her see you I’m not responsible for what kinds of lies I’ll have to tell. Don’t you dare scare Prada.”

“Your purse?” asked Erica, baffled.

“My _dog_. The room next to mine belongs to him, and—”

Laura left the two betas listening incredulously to Lydia’s apparently extensive instructions about how not to disturb her dog, and turned to Scott and Stiles.

“How about you guys? When can we rely on you if something happens, and how much school can you miss?”

Stiles looked at Scott; Scott looked at the floor.

“I can’t miss school. Not this year,” he muttered.

“Scotty had some academic difficulties last year, relating to the learning disability known as turning into a frikkin’ werewolf,” Stiles filled in helpfully.

“Hey, no worries, that’s why I asked.” Laura couldn’t imagine trying to deal with suddenly being a werewolf and having to go to high school at the same time. “Let’s try to sort this out fast so you can concentrate on school, yeah?”

“Sure, let’s go with blind optimism, sounds fun,” Stiles said brightly, and flailed away when Laura glared at him.

“I’m gonna assume you’re used to making up work in the five minutes before class because you had other stuff going on, so this whole werewolf thing is nothing new,” she guessed, and was rewarded with Stiles’ suspicious squint.

“Psychic werewolves. Freaky.”

_Or I just know your type, kid._ “Yep. Speaking of which, Lydia says you’re the researcher, Stiles?”

“She said that?” That look transformed his whole face, in a surprising way. When he was incisive or suspicious or intrigued, Stiles’ face was unique and somehow much too old, not in the unwrinkled pale skin or the soft mouth but the deep, very serious eyes. But this look, giddy and caught right in between self-conscious and not, flipped him back into a teenager. It faded quickly, and in the contrast Laura saw it more than ever, the disproportionate weight in his eyes.

“Yes, her notes say your inductive reasoning is very strong.”

“…cool.” The very tips of his ears had gone pink. Laura kind of wanted to pinch them and coo. He ducked his head a little, a jerky, awkward motion, and scrubbed a hand over his hair as if trying to wash out that moment of surprised honesty. When he looked up again he was wary. “So why the sudden Stiles party? What do you want?”

“Research, duh.” Scott sniggered a little and Stiles punched him in the arm without breaking eye contact with Laura. “On two things. One, do you think you could figure out when the Alpha pack got here? And anything about what they’ve done since? Based on, I don’t know, like incident reports or something police-y like that?”

“I don’t think---huh. Hm. Yeah, maybe. If…maybe.” His fingers tapped out a little rhythm on his own thigh, contemplative. That seemed like a good sign.

“Awesome, thank you. And two, can you figure out what the hell ‘the Nemeton is dormant’ might mean?”

“…is it about Transformers?”

“God I hope not.”

“I’ll Google it.”

“Great. Okay, next question: do you guys know…” She looked down to consult hastily-scribbled notes on the back of her hand, “Danielle Aruha, Heather Liebowitz and Danny Mahealani?”

“Uh, yes.” Stiles’ mildly suspicious expression turned into real alarm. “Yes we do. How do you?”

“We do? I mean, we know Danny, but…” Scott was looking suspicious too.

“Heather’s a friend from when I was a kid, she goes to Beacon Heights. Danielle’s her girlfriend. Today is Heather’s birthday. How the hell do you know their names?”

Shit. Laura really distrusted coincidences.


	8. Chapter 8

Heather Leibowitz’s house was all the way across town. Laura squeezed into the back of Lydia’s car with Erica on one side and Scott on the other, and tried to keep her elbows to herself. In the front, Boyd stretched his long legs out in a distinctly smug manner. Stiles had gone home first to get his present for Heather.

“It’s probably a car. Maybe an airplane.” Lydia flicked her turn signal with an elegantly disdainful gesture.

“He was trying to be nice.” Laura had no idea what they were talking about but it was making Scott squirm in his seat, which wasn’t helping the “packed like sardines” situation.

“He was trying to make me feel like I owed him, was what he was doing.”

“He wasn’t! Not on purpose. He’s seen a lot of movies where that’s a nice thing to do, okay?”

“Oh well then, if it was in a _movie_.”

Lydia was a good driver, Laura noted absently, but a nervous one. Not obviously, by any means, it was only evident in the laser focus of her eyes on the road and the slight frosty edge to the scent of her sweat. Not fear, not really, just…uncertainty. Belatedly, Laura realized that Lydia was in fact only seventeen. This was probably only her second year of driving, if that. That pang shot through her again: urgent, desperately impotent protectiveness for a girl who could raise the dead but was nervous about left-hand turns.

They parked in front of Heather’s house, which was just as palatial as Lydia’s and elicited a pursed mouth of judgement from her. They were early, thankfully; all the windows were lit up but there were only two, maybe three bodies inside if Laura’s nose was to be believed. Behind them Stiles’ Jeep chugged up to the curb and shuddered to a stop slightly too close to Lydia’s bumper.

“Stiles? Oh look at you, you’re so tall!” A woman met them at the door, white, middle-aged, pleasantly chubby with a cute navy blue dress. “And your friends are all here, welcome.” She ushered them all inside, didn’t spare so much as a glance at Laura’s tank top and jeans—not exactly party clothes—or incongruously adult features. Inattentive or accepting? Either way Laura was glad.

“I’m off to meet Josie for dinner, give you kids some space, but thank you so much for coming! Tell your father I say hello.”

Off she went, and they were left alone in the massive front room of the house.

“I can see my face in the floor.” Boyd peered at his reflection in the shiny tile with bafflement. Erica glanced down as well and began to fix her hair dramatically.

“Bro you did not say this thing was gonna be fancy,” Scott whined. He tugged at the edge of his t-shirt awkwardly, and glared at Stiles’ button-down and slacks. Laura was a little overcome with nostalgia. She remembered being insecure about her clothes, about feeling like she had to dress ‘right’ for the occasion, but it felt like another lifetime. Back before she’d come into far, far more power than a nineteen-year-old could wield and still remain a teenager with concerns about propriety.

“Stiles? Ohmygod you are super early?? Like, hi, but also what the hell?” A girl with springy blonde hair came down the stairs and stopped short on the third-to-last step, looking a little horrified at all the people in her foyer. She was also very obviously still in pajamas, though they were cute and had little pictures of cake and ice cream sundaes on them.

“Heather, hey, I’m really sorry.” Stiles gestured a little helplessly at all the strangers he’d invaded this girl’s home with. “I just thought…I…uh…hm. I should have come up with an explanation before now, huh.”

Sometimes you didn’t get anything as a werewolf other than the general sense of danger. Laura liked to think of it in horror movie terms; the audience always knew when something bad was about to happen because the music changed. Being a werewolf was like hearing the echo of that music, just on the edge of apprehension.

“Hey Heather, I’m Laura. Is there somewhere private we could go that’s out of the way of any more guests who arrive? I need to talk to you about something.”

Maybe Heather heard that music too, her little prey ears pricking in the wind. Maybe she thought Laura looked like a responsible adult, as terrifying as that was to contemplate. Maybe she was just one of those people who trusted people with an authoritative tone of voice. Whatever the reason she blinked at Laura several times and then nodded and gestured her back up the stairs. Their whole entourage trooped along after, of course, so Laura found herself ushered into a bedroom decorated with art and dried flowers that was really not big enough to hold eight people comfortably.

“Uh. Hey.” Person number eight, presumably the girlfriend Danielle, was on the bed with her toes half painted. She looked up like a deer in the headlights at their awkward entry.

“Hi.” Laura shooed Boyd and Erica out from between her and Heather, shoved Scott in the shoulder insistently until he crowded back against the closet door to make space, and finally managed to get herself situated so that she could stand in the approximate middle of the room (a “power position” according to a really dumb seminar she’d taken once) and look both Heather and Danielle straight in the eyes.

“I’m going to say some things that are going to be weird and scary now. And you’re going to need to trust that I’m saying them because I’m worried about your safety and I want to help.”

They both looked at her with huge, worried eyes. She felt a little like she was about to tell two children what happened to Bambi’s mother.

Laura had never actually had to give the “werewolves are real and I am one” talk to a human before. She kind of stumbled her way through it, with Stiles helpfully providing color commentary. Heather screamed a little and hid in Danielle’s shoulder when Laura flashed the fangy version of her face, but by the end she was willing to reach out and poke at Laura’s claws with one pale, shaking finger.

“Wow. Like, wow. Like what the fuck,” she whispered, her flimsy little human nails making soft ‘tik’ noises against Laura’s claws.

“Like for real. Babe if we had decided to pre-game this party I would understand what was happening right now? But this is some weird shit,” Danielle agreed. She looked from Stiles to Laura to Heather and back again. “But I’mma go with it. Can I feel them too?”

“Go for it,” Laura sighed, and offered her other hand. ‘Dear diary. Second day of my second chance at life. Played show and tell with high school girls. Not sure if this counts as a successful breach of secrecy on the whole supernatural thing or not.’

There was that third kid, Danny, running around too, she remembered. Maybe when they did this with him they’d do a powerpoint presentation or something.

Eventually she managed to drag Danielle and Heather’s attention away from her claws again. This next part was very difficult to explain, mostly because she had literally no details other than vague sense of foreboding.

“Danielle. You’ve been identified as someone who might be…more at risk, I guess, from the fangy-clawy denizens of Beacon Hills. And Heather, as someone Danielle is close to, your name came up as well. We’re here to warn you, and to promise that I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”

“More at risk? What does that mean?” Danielle, to her credit, squared her shoulders like she was getting ready to punch whatever threat might materialize right in its face.

Honestly Laura had no clue. ‘Candidates like them draw danger’…way to be totally unhelpful, Marin. Laura took a literally wild guess. “Are you into Wicca? Paganism? Magic? Anything like that?”

“Uh. Like, a tiny bit? Are you serious, that’s a _risk_?”

“Unfortunately, in your case yes. But it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It just means right now is kind of an intense time in this town, and you’re on some people’s radars. Sorry.”

“Oh my _god_.” Danielle made a helpless little gesture with her hand, which, yeah, Laura knew that feeling. What could you even say, to something like that? Heather captured the flailing hand the next second, trapped it in her own and squeezed tight. Giving reassurance and taking it too, the kind of natural action Laura had never really managed to get comfortable enough to share with a girlfriend. Not that that was relevant right now.

“I want you to exchange phone numbers with all these guys, and call them if anything seems weird or suspicious. And I don’t want you to go anywhere alone for a little while, okay? Especially at night, and especially off the main streets. Stay in the center of town, around plenty of people if you can. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a really good start.”

They both nodded, eyes wide. Laura hoped it was anything like the right advice, because seriously, she had no idea how or why they might be targeted. Maybe the right advice was to flee to an abandoned cabin in the woods, for all she knew.

“Should I cancel the party? Is it not safe?”

Damn, good question. “Being in the middle of brightly lit rooms with a ton of people isn’t actually a bad plan right now,” she started, then reconsidered. “On the other hand, today being your birthday is too much for me to ignore. Is it your eighteenth?” A nod. “Hm. Not as important as sixteen, but still has some weight, symbolically. Something might go down tonight. Heather, how do you feel about having a werewolf perimeter guard?”

“I feel very classy. All the cool parties have bouncers,” Heather announced, and flashed a smile that only looked 40% fake.

 

“So why is sixteen more important than eighteen?” Lydia inquired, her tone and fixed gaze on her phone implying she didn’t really care about the answer but was making conversation. Laura didn’t look at her to reply either; the bright screen would ruin her night vision if she focused on it, so she kept her eyes trained outwards on the dark streets, with only an occasional glance at Scott’s position to her left or Boyd’s to her right. From behind her the noise of the party spilled out of the house, a babble of voices and music and the scents of food and sweat.

“I’m not really sure. It’s probably just a cultural thing, you know? Most packs, sixteen is when you’re not a kid any more, and then twenty is when you’re an adult. It’s kind of an unspoken thing; no matter how bad the blood is between you and your enemy, you don’t touch anyone younger than sixteen. Fuckfaces like the Alpha Pack think they’re too badass to follow the rules, of course, unspoken or not. And hunters, they don’t care.”

“So I’m not a child.” Laura did look at Lydia for that, blinking. Her eyes were still fixed on her phone and her voice was almost overly disinterested. “By your rules, I mean.”

“Yeah. You’re, like, a teen. Not an adult, no one would expect you to live on your own or become Alpha or anything. But you might be trusted to represent your pack at a gathering, or travel on your own. Lead a hunt, even, if your pack did that kind of thing.”

“Seems excessively formal.”

“It’s not, really. It’s weirder to explain it than to just…know that’s how it works.”

“So when does—” Lydia’s voice stopped, very suddenly, and alertness flooded Laura, icy cold. In front of them, in the trees across the street, there was a patch of darkness that was not shallow enough. She heard no heartbeat, but she did hear a strange whine, high-pitched like an old TV.

Laura took one step forward, and then something was _there_ next to her, impossibly fast. She got the smell of mildew and wet, clammy flesh, and the brief impression of too-pale skin, torn asunder right across. A hand shot out, tendons pronounced and strong, and Lydia was off her feet and lifted into the air by her throat.

“Not my planned meal, but you’ll do,” the figure hissed, and Lydia made a terrible choking noise, trying to breathe.

Laura’s first swing was for the stomach, intended to disembowel. Her claws passed through what felt uncannily like an empty shroud but she didn’t pause, aimed for the throat next.

“Mutt,” the thing hissed, and took one hand off Lydia long enough to backhand Laura. The impact was massive; Laura was lifted off her feet and flew almost two meters, into a streetlight that shattered. She rolled when she hit the ground, found her feet again, and—

A scream.

It was even stronger this close, so powerful Laura’s hair and ears laid back. She actually saw the waves it made in the air, rippling away from Lydia and through the creature holding her. The thing dropped her, clapped its hands over its ears even though, to Laura, this time the scream was more wind and force than actual volume. Lydia fell to the ground, skirt and hair spreading out around her in a pool; Laura caught her head before it hit, barely aware of having moved; the thing ran.

“Boyd check inside! Scott I need you!” Laura shouted, just this side of a howl. She felt it hook him, but he was around the corner and the figure was running already. She grabbed a piece of broken glass, heedless of the momentary cuts to her fingers, and threw; the figure shrieked in pain but kept running, and she couldn’t quite see where she’d hit it.

“Damn damn damn damn damn!”

“Lydia!” Scott was there, gasping in horror at the still body Laura was cradling.

“She’s breathing! Can you smell blood? I hit the thing, can you follow it?”

Scott sniffed wildly, trying to pick up the trace. Laura hated him a little bit for not being Derek in that moment, Derek who would have found the trail in an instant and followed without Laura even having to vocalize the order.

“I smell it, but I can’t…I don’t know where it went.” Scott’s shoulders slumped.

“It’s okay.” By the time she said it she believed it. It wasn’t his fault.

“Is Lydia…”

“Unconscious. I think.” Very carefully, and aware that it was an imposition Lydia wouldn’t have wanted, Laura rested a hand on her slim throat. She was shitty at drawing out pain but she did her best, and from what she got she didn’t think the thing had crushed her windpipe. Her lungs were expanding with each breath, at least, which seemed like a good sign?

It was pretty amazing that in the split second the thing had taken a hand off her to hit Laura, she’d gotten enough air to scream like that. It was even more amazing that a scream had somehow phased that creature, when werewolf claws had had no effect. Surreptitiously, Laura took a sniff of Lydia’s scent. She smelled human, just like before. But there was something there, now that Laura was looking for it; something ozone, a storm front gathering.

“Scott, you understand human bodies better than I do. Does she need the ER?”

“…maybe?”

“No I don’t.” Lydia didn’t so much open her eyes as transition from unconscious to glaring.

“You sure?” Laura helped her sit up and then let go, very cognizant of the reaction the last time she’d touched her.

“Sure we couldn’t explain what happened sufficiently? Yes.” Lydia rubbed her throat slowly, up and down once, then dropped her hand. “What was it?’

“No clue.”

“Wonderful.”

“Yeah. Scott, check on Boyd inside? Make sure Danielle and Heather are okay.”

“All the other guests too, right?”

“Sure, I _guess_.” Scott giggled a little at her exaggeratedly reluctant tone, and went.

Stiles hadn’t stopped expounding on his “alien abduction” theory by the time they got back to Lydia’s house. Laura was a little grateful for the background noise; her thoughts were back at Heather’s house, where she’d done her best to secure the place with tripwires in the yard and a pitfall by the back door but wasn’t sure it would be enough. If the thing came back there was no guarantee Danielle and Heather would be safe, and that was eating at her. She wondered again if they should have had Danielle file a police report of some kind, make up a stalker or a creepy older man watching her, anything to get her a police detail. But there was no guarantee the cops would take it seriously—it wasn’t like the statistics were on their side with police and protecting young black women who felt threatened—and best case scenario, what were they going to do against something that had shrugged off a werewolf?

“So anyways next time I think we should bring a camera, just in case there’s another encounter of the third kind,” Stiles concluded as he banged his way into the kitchen. Boyd and Erica were already there, rooting in the fridge and making sad growly noises; Lydia’s house was apparently not quite ready for werewolf metabolisms. Lydia gave them a narrowed glare.

“You know what would have been _really_ useful? If we’d had an archer,” she said pointedly, and swished away upstairs before anyone had a chance to respond.

“I hate her very much a lot,” Erica announced.


	9. Chapter 9

Laura woke the next morning to the sounds of someone typing furiously. She was fuzzy and confused for a moment, not sure if she was in grad school and her housemate had a chapter due or if she was in college and her roommate was IMing at 4am again. The next minute the smells around her located her properly in time and space, and after a minute of blinking at the ceiling, she swung herself out of bed and padded down the hall to see what was going on.

Lydia stopped typing sharply when Laura knocked on her door, but took almost four seconds before she called “Who is it?” Hiding something.

“Laura.”

“Oh.” A ‘flump’ of feet on carpet, approaching heartbeat, the click of the doorknob. Lydia was in a nightdress that looked much too lacy to be solo sleepwear. But then again, what did Laura know about fashion? “What?”

“Heard the typing. What’s up?”

“Ugh that’s so creepy.”

“Sorry.”

“Whatever.”

Lydia thrust her laptop into Laura’s hands and then flopped back onto her bed. There were wads of cotton between her toes, and the harsh smell of acetone was in the air. Laura wondered how early she’d woken, for her nails to be done and drying by 6:22am.

Laura sat herself in the armchair across the room and looked at the laptop screen. It was some kind of task management app, she knew that much, cute in that distinctly graphic-designed sort of way.

Across the top there were large bubbles, each a different pastel color. “Alpha Pack” read one of them: “Crypt Monster”, “Allison’s dumb dad”, “Police”, “Stupid baby werewolves”, “Motorcycle girl”, “Guidance counselor bitch”. Below each bubble, sprouting like upside-down trees, were little flows of information and deduction.

Alpha Pack:

  * Deucalion: classic family annihilator psychology 
  * targets the alpha: surrogate for his past self, duh 
  * other members: Kali (Erica says talked back to D once and didn’t get punished, need more info), Ennis (obeys, huge), twins (combine into alpha form? Like what the fuck even?) 
  * does being a subservient alpha affect one’s power level? Could we pick them off one by one? 
  * losing a pack member: does it weaken the alpha? 
  * when did they arrive? (Stiles will investigate) 
  * they spent three months holding Boyd and Erica, why? 
  * ultimate goal: obtain another alpha who has killed their pack 
  * they wanted Erica or Boyd to break and kill for them 
  * didn’t use any standard torture or brainwashing techniques: stupid/unable to google search? Weird cultural purists “only werewolf-style brainwashing will do”?? 
  * next logical target: Isaac 
  * what are they waiting for? 
  * despite a power advantage, they did not attack the biggest threat first (Derek, lol): driven by pathological psychology, not tactics

Laura experienced a rush of gratitude so powerful her head felt light for a moment. The initiative and forethought to write this up, the insight to draw these kinds of conclusions…Lydia was so much, there was _so much to her_. Laura was used to going through life mostly being a couple steps ahead of people. (Some of that, she knew, was because she’d had to grow up very fast and hadn’t managed to slow down since. Her pace of life was still a little frantic even on her best days.) It wasn’t often that she came up against the understanding of someone else’s complexity and found herself overwhelmed by it, but invariably what came with was a towering, staggering respect.

“You are so incredible,” she said, low and under her breath and wholly unplanned. There was a little noise from the bed.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Laura gave her head and shoulders a little shake, to settle herself. To her surprise, Lydia giggled.

“What?” She looked up and Lydia had one hand over her mouth, eyes crinkled. That look, not frozen in fear or trepidation or hard dignity for once, transformed her whole face.

“Sorry, you just…that thing you did was such a _dog thing_.”

Laura barked out a laugh. “Oh my god you did not just say that to me.”

“God I totally did, you would not even be arguing if you’d seen it, it was _egregious_.”

“You’re so rude, oh my god you’re such a brat!”

“It’s not my fault, you did it right in front of me!”

Laura’s mouth was hanging open, half in laughter and half in offense. Lydia was giggling, and smiling so hard her cheeks were almost round. When the laughter died off naturally there was a silence in the room, but a very _close_ silence. Laura could smell the leftover laughter still lingering in the air and their blood, and there was a warmth inside her and around her, enveloping like a comfortable blanket.

Lydia met her eyes straight on for probably the first time since she’d revived her. There was a difference between eye contact with a hardness behind it, a challenge or defense, and the kind of eye contact that actually connected, that made it seem like the person actually wanted to be seen. This contact shocked Laura a little. She felt a jolt, like she’d touched something electric back behind those pale, impeccably lined eyes.

“I miss Allison.” Oh, the first moment when someone trusted you enough to share something they needed was _so precious_. Lydia bit her lip a little and Laura saw doubts flash across her face, instant regret for opening her mouth.

“It’s okay. Tell me, let me help,” she said, so soft she kind of ached with it.

“It’s not…a priority.”

“It is to you. So it is to me. Tell me, Lydia. I’ll fix it, you know I will.” Laura didn’t have nearly a good enough success rate so far for Lydia to take that on faith, but her teeth dug into her lip a little more and she nodded anyways.

“I was just…things work better when she’s…and I’m scared that she might…and it would be good to…” Laura had never heard Lydia stop and start like this. She’d never heard her sound even a little unsure about what she wanted to say. Unthinking, she moved closer to the bed, crouched down next to where Lydia sat so they were eye level. Lydia held the eye contact, twisted her hands in her lap, and burst out, “She’s my _best friend_.”

“And you miss her.”

“It’s not just about me; we _need_ her. And I’m worried about her.”

_You know it would have been okay if it was just about you, right?_ Laura didn’t say it. Now, she sensed, wasn’t the time for that.

“So let’s go get her.”

Lydia’s face flickered through surprise and into resignation.

“We can’t. I wrote it down there.”

Laura glanced back at the computer screen, abandoned when she’d moved from the chair. She couldn’t read the whole string of bullet points under “Allison’s dumb dad” from here, but one stood out clearly because it was in all caps: “EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE FUCKFACE”. 

“I don’t expect you to have any motivation to help Allison. That wouldn’t be fair.” When Laura looked back at her, Lydia’s walls were up again and her voice held that dignified, removed tone Laura was more used to from her.

“My motivation’s sitting right here,” Laura said. It was maybe too straightforward; she regretted it a little, when Lydia’s face went shocked and soft and she realized she’d taken a wrecking ball to those rebuilt walls.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So tell me honestly; if I get her for you, she won’t hurt any of us? I trust your judgement, Lydia, tell me your honest prediction and I’ll believe it.”

“God.” Lydia took a shuddery breath, in and out, and closed her eyes for a second. Laura thought she might be trying not to cry. That hadn’t at all been Laura’s intention, to overwhelm her like this. “There’s a…there’s a thing with Derek.”

_Don’t hurt my brother you Argent bitch_. Laura controlled the thought. She knew better than to trust that kind of reaction in herself.

“Okay. So we keep them apart.”

“Yeah. And…she really messed up, with Erica and Boyd. She wouldn’t do it again, but if they attack her…she’s pretty well _trained_.” There was so much anger there, on that word. For the first time Laura thought about what it might be like to be friends—best friends—with a girl and watch her be broken into a warrior.

“Okay. I know how to postpone that issue.” Keeping people from interacting substantially was pretty easy, especially when you had enough balls in the air. The trick was to avoid you or them being caught by surprise. That whole transparency-versus-efficiency equation.

“This doesn’t have to be a priority,” Lydia said again. She offered it as if she was giving Laura an out.

“It’s important to you.” Laura stood up, with a little huff of effort from being crouched down for so long. Being a werewolf didn’t exempt her from getting stiff in her old age. “So let’s figure out what our other priorities are, and then tonight, you go get Allison Argent and meet me at 8pm at the children’s park next to the cemetery.”

“Please.” When Laura glanced back at her, Lydia was the self she’d gotten used to these past few days, neck long, head high, mouth pursed. There was a little something, though. The corners of her eyes weren’t as tight. “You forgot the please, there.”

“Uh. Please.”

“There we go.”

 

Laura took the next two hours to review, in great detail, the rest of Lydia’s brainstorming tree. ‘Invaluable’ was too restrained a word for it, and for Lydia. Laura knew two alphas and a CEO who would commit murder with little to no hesitation to have an analyst like this on their side.

By the time she was done reviewing and adding her own thoughts (“Don’t mix yours up with mine! Make your own chart!” “Oh, what, mine have cooties?” “If you want my insights respect my process!” “Jeez, fine…”), Erica and Boyd were awake. Laura cornered them in the kitchen, which was a pretty reliable place to tree any werewolf.

“Hey kids. Getting enough calories? You’re gonna want some unprocessed grains for energy along with that protein.”

Erica grunted at her, her mouth full of what looked like roast beef, but Boyd looked up and came over to her. He was looking at the old-fashioned landline phone on the table next to her, Laura realized. Looking at it like it was a venomous snake that he was, nevertheless, going to reach out and grab. Dang, that’s right, she remembered now. Here we go.

“You said twenty-four hours.”

“I did say that.” Laura heard his heartbeat. He had a really large ribcage—of course he did, built broad like he was—and it echoed in his chest. It was a very lonely heartbeat, she realized sadly. Big and solid but very, very lonely.

“I’d like to call my family now, please.” So polite. The echoes of his heart sped up into anxiety, and he tucked his bottom lip under his teeth, eyes searching her face. He thought she was going to say no. He thought she was playing some kind of mind game with him. Oh, this kid. All these kids.

“Absolutely. I have one question first.” Laura tried to figure out a way to phrase this tactfully. She wasn’t sure there really was one. “You don’t seem like the kind of kid who runs away from home on a whim, or who’d disappear into a new relationship like Erica told her parents. Where are you going to say you’ve been?”

To her surprise, his single-focus stare on the phone broke at that, and he flumped himself into a seat at the kitchen table with a massive sigh.

“I have _no clue_.”

“No, hey, it’s okay, we’ll figure something out.”

“You don’t get it.” He rested his head in one hand. “I tell them every day when I’m getting home after work. I call if I’m going to be as much as five minutes late. We all do. Our schedules are taped to the fridge. I’ve never been out of touch with them for longer than five hours.”

“Oh hell.” Laura couldn’t get Boyd to make eye contact with her because he was still hiding behind his fingers, so she took a chance and reached out for his other hand on the table. He stiffened when she squeezed his palm, then slumped. “You lost someone.”

“My sister.” He squeezed her hand, then, hard enough that if Laura had been human it probably would have hurt. She was glad to be able to squeeze back, nice and firm.

“How long…?”

“Ten years.” Fucking ten years, had everything bad in the world happened ten years ago? Had Boyd lost his sister while Laura’s family burned?

“Did you ever find out…?”

“No.” Better or worse than burying them? she wondered.

“So with you missing…”

“I can’t believe I did this to them.” His voice broke around a sob. Erica had been doing a great job of fading into the background—something of the wallflower left in her, despite the new look and attitude, nothing wrong with that—but now she came over and tucked her head onto his shoulder, snuffled into his neck a little. That was a good wolf instinct, that kind of nonverbal comfort. Laura approved. These two were good pack, even missing an alpha.

“You didn’t do anything. Alpha buttfaces,” Erica mumbled, knocking her skull into Boyd’s gently.

“I’m with Erica on this. Not your fault. Let’s figure out something to say so that your folks know that.”

Boyd’s spine straightened a little bit at that. He finally moved his hand so Laura could see his face; his eyes were wet, and he wiped them on Erica’s hair casually. That was sweet but also very sad, because how many times had he done that, locked up together, for the motion to be so practiced?

“I could say I had an accident.” His voice was still scratchy, a little layer of tears underneath. He’d thought about possible excuses, she realized. It had been guilt, not lack of options, that stymied him.

“And then were in a coma? Super telenovela, I’m into it.” Erica nodded enthusiastically.

“Solid choice,” Laura agreed. “Only issue I see is we need medical records of some kind. Anyone have an in at BHGH? Or another hospital?”

“Scott’s mom works there.”

“Oh, perfect. Boyd, you go ahead and call home? And then when Scott gets out of school you can work on how to fake having been in a coma for three months.” She closed her eyes a minute, trying to figure out if there was anything missing here. “Oh, if they ask about medical bills tell them…tell them I paid them because I’m the one who found you. Or caused the accident, even, if you feel like that’s more believable, I don’t mind. You can use the name Laura Carter, I’ve gone by that before.

“Okay?” she asked, mostly about the plan but a little bit about everything.

“Okay,” he answered, and squeezed her hand again before standing up and heading over to the phone. Laura listened in long enough to hear “Mama? It’s…it’s Vernon,” and the woman on the other end shriek, and then she herded Erica out of the room to give the guy some privacy.

“I can totally still hear his side through the wall,” Erica muttered.

“Duh, but we’re giving him space. Also I want to give you an update.”

Erica’s eyebrows shot up at that, though Laura didn’t see what was so surprising about it.

“Uh. Okay? I accept the terms and conditions, update away?” Hah. Cute.

“You and Boyd still want to find the girl who saved you, right?”

“ _Yes_.”

“I think it’s a great idea. She seems like she’s on our side, or at least did you guys a solid.”

“She was special.” Now that was an _interesting_ smell. Erica’s pupils had narrowed, almost pinpricks, and something in her scent profile had changed. Nothing Laura recognized, not the way she could identify anger or attraction or fear, but definitely something distinct. A new note.

“Cool. Well, you and Boyd are the ones who saw her, and more importantly smelled her, so you’re the ones who can find her. But to do that, you need to know how to track a scent.”

“Like a dog.”

“Like a wolf, genius.”

Erica rolled her eyes, which Laura chose to take as an indication that she’d won that one.

“Okay. So, like, boot camp 2.0? I’m down, last time was pretty hot.”

Laura had no idea what she meant by that. She did know that Erica’s shoulders had come up, not defensive so much as braced. Something Laura said had told her to get ready for pain. Something the Alpha Pack had done to her? That was sad and angering.

“Yeah, pretty much. What I’d like you to do is to take Boyd, and basically play hide-and-seek with your eyes closed. You get it? One person hides, the other person finds them using smell alone. Hearing is okay but try not to rely on it, try to make it as much about your nose as possible.”

“What are we, five years old?” Erica was definitely insulted. Laura was…not super sympathetic.

“In fact, this is about where we start the _three_ -year-old kids on learning tracking. Sorry that my brother’s saliva didn’t upload an entire lifetime of experience for you.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah the bite’s pretty gross, when you think about it.”

Laura turned to go at that, pretty sure Erica’s agreement to the plan had been tacit, but Erica shot out a hand and grabbed her elbow. Quite hard, actually, enough so that Laura made herself turn back around slowly instead of whirling and growling, struggled not to think of it as a challenge.

“What if I do it wrong?”

“…what, tracking?” Laura didn’t know where she was going with this. “Then you…won’t find Boyd hiding? And he’ll probably make fun of you? And then you’ll try again?”

“’Try again.’ Easy as that.” Erica was eying her with distinct suspicion. Laura was aware now that she was confounding some kind of expectation, some idea Erica had of how she’d approach things, but she couldn’t tell what it was or where she’d gotten it. Was she expecting some kind of grade, like in school?

“Yeah. Why, would something else work better? We can do it differently. How would you like it to go?”

Erica’s eyes narrowed even further. She was a very expressive person, Laura was learning; she wanted to be Lydia, wanted every quirk of her mouth and tilt of her chin controlled and calculated, but it wasn’t in her nature. Laura hoped she’d accept some day that her large eyes and mobile mouth and ready grin were just as okay a way to be.

“We’re fighting a war, you know. We don’t have time for playtime.” It still gutted Laura to hear things like that from a fifteen-year-old. She took a deep breath and made sure that she wasn’t going to talk down to her, that she treated her with the respect she was demanding with her hard tone.

“You’re not wrong. But specifically, we’re defending our territory against an invasion. And although it might not seem like it now, that gives us some advantages. But we need to be able to use those advantages when they present themselves, and tracking is part of it. For whatever reason, we’re not actively under attack right now. So now is the time to build up skills that will help us handle it when we are.” Laura surveyed Erica’s still-suspicious face, and sighed. “Any of this helping this make any more sense?”

Erica tossed her hair, another Lydia move that she couldn’t quite manage to carbon copy.

“Your PR campaign is getting really old. We’re not falling for it and we’re not going to make you alpha if you’re nice enough to us,” she informed Laura in what was clearly meant to be a devastating takedown, and then turned and went back into the kitchen.

Laura blinked. She had approximately no idea what that had been about.

With the betas taken care of for the day, Laura used Lydia’s cell phone to call Danielle and Heather to check in—nothing, no resurfacing of the monster—and then texted Marin too, just in case sending her a description of the creature yielded anything. Her somewhat facetious ‘If that thing is your new girlfriend I’m definitely winning the breakup’ went unanswered, but she wasn’t sure if that meant a) Marin knew about the thing and was coming up with a deflection, b) she didn’t know about the thing and was freaking out in her very quiet way, or c) she thought Laura was being an asshole and was giving her the silent treatment. Any of the three were fairly likely.

With all her avenues of inquiry on the monster exhausted, Laura had to turn to her nemesis: the internet. She stole Lydia’s computer—Lydia was highlighting furiously in a massive organic chemistry textbook at the time and barely even glanced up to nod her acquiescence—and settled herself in the kitchen with an angry and resigned huff. She was the people person for a reason: she was so not into this keyword-and-source-referencing shit.

Lydia had written one thing in her ‘Crypt Monster’ notes that Laura found especially helpful: “either connected to the Alpha Pack or not; until the answer is found, need two parallel lines of inquiry.” She’d then gone on to elaborate: if it was connected to the Alpha Pack, was it part of the pack, auxiliary to the pack, an enemy of theirs, or some kind of side-effect of their presence? If it wasn’t, how could the coincidence of them appearing at the same time be explained, was there a mutually causal factor?

Laura could narrow down that list of questions slightly, mostly through inherited knowledge. The monster wasn’t a werewolf, and what’s more, it hadn’t been near a werewolf recently based on the lack of scent. There was the possibility that it was a corrupted bitten of some kind; if Deucalion bit someone and the bite half-took, Laura wouldn’t be surprised if something that weird-looking was the end result.

Working off that theory for a bit, Laura started searching the supernatural wikis and forums she had access to for recorded incidents of something flesh-rotted and very physically strong that could be activated by a werewolf bite. She hadn’t gotten very far—once again, _not_ the research person—when Lydia came down the stairs in a clatter of heels and a swish of deep purple skirt.

“I’m going to get Allison now. Meet us at the park?”

“Yep. Oh, and I invited Scott,” Laura remembered suddenly.

“What? Why?” Lydia’s carefully penciled brows furrowed.

“If he sees that I’m not going to hurt her, he’ll buy in to helping us. Which means he’ll tell us stuff, especially about his mysterious boss who he right now doesn’t trust us with. He’ll be on our side in the event of a conflict between us and the betas, too.”

Lydia’s eyes widened. She hadn’t considered that possibility, which was another reminder to Laura how innocent she really was despite all her skills. Erica and Boyd seemed like great people, strong and loving. But just because someone was a good person didn’t mean their interests and yours would never conflict, and planning for that eventuality was, in fact, 80% of an alpha’s job in times of both war and peace.

“Also, the poor guy is really worried about Allison. Same as you are,” she added as an afterthought, and Lydia shook off her surprise for a more familiar veneer of scorn.

“Whatever. He was never good enough for her,” she proclaimed as she swept out the door. Laura laughed, a little, at how obviously her heart skipped with the lie.





	10. Chapter 10

Laura got to the park at 7:55, just as it was getting dark. She saw Lydia there by the edge of the grass, long pink skirt and flowing hair, looking like some kind of forest sprite. Like a sign of spring.

Then she saw who was with her, and her mind went a little blank with rage.

“Lydia.” Laura could not take her eyes away from Chis Argent, and she could not control her tone, the growl that burred underneath the words. Barely, at the edge of her control, she found space to remember that Lydia did not take orders well. “It might not be safe here.”

“Is that a threat?” Argent puffed up immediately, hands on his hips like he thought he was a fucking cowboy. Lydia had skipped several steps away from the both of them the moment she saw the murder in Laura’s face and now looked between them, mouth pursed and eyes wide.

“Your choice Lydia. What’s a good division of valuable assets, here.”

“Mmh.” Lydia got the message. She walked away from Argent, past Laura with barely a glance to acknowledge her presence. “Scott’s here,” she said, off hand, as she left.

That was too bad. Laura got the sense that Scott had seen a lot of death already, in his young life, and now he was going to see another one. Because she was going to rip this murderer apart, get her hands all up in his genocidal skin and spill his blood all over this nice, green grass.

In this park. Where children came to play. Where Laura had played, with her family, when she was younger, practicing keeping the human face on even while she was running and climbing and laughing. Learning how to get along with the other kids, learning that they were just as fun to play with as her werewolf friends, even if she had to be more careful. 

Laura took two deep, shuddering breaths, and put the bloodlust away. Duty was a hell of an anchor, because you always had a duty to someone, didn’t you? A duty to yourself. To your family’s memories, to be someone they’d be proud of. To the kids who used this park, not to seed their childhoods with blood the way hers had been, the way Argent thought she brought with her inevitably.  

“Hello Scott.” He was right up next to her by now, looking at the locked gaze that she and Argent still hadn’t broken. She wondered what Argent thought he saw in her face. She wondered if, when her eyes had quieted from gold back to hazel, he’d thought her determination to take him down had in the least bit waned. She was just going to do it the slower way now, was all.

“Hi Mr. Argent.” Scott was afraid of him, but the note of fear was the only clear one in a whole other mess of smells. Complicated. Laura supposed that made sense. “I thought you said Allison was coming.”

“I thought she was. Something go wrong in the transmission of my message, Chris?”

He started at the use of his first name. What, like she hadn’t grown up with regular meetings and negotiations, her at her mother’s side and him at his mother’s back? Like she didn’t remember him and Kate standing in locked rank, the honor guard for their horrible murdering parents?

“Allison won’t be joining us.”

“No shit.” He started again at the curse, looked as if he was going to reprimand her but then realized she was definitely too old for that now. It would be funny, if she wasn’t so angry. “Tell me, has Argent law changed? Is the oldest woman no longer the head of the family? Do territory negotiations no longer go through the matriarch?”

“That’s not what this is.” He looked at her like he thought his calm, steady voice was doing something useful here. Demonstrating his superior civilized state, or whatever. “This is not a time for negotiations; it’s a time for you to think hard about what you’re doing here and how long you want to stay. This is a warning, Laura. Stay away from us, and don’t hurt anyone. We’ll be watching.”

Oh good. He’d decided to go the aggro route. That made things delightfully simple.

“Oh, believe me, I’m thinking hard.” She was. Rage blanked her mind but fury focused it, another reason anchors were so important. And right now Laura’s mind was lit up like a Solstice tree, turning Chris Argent around and around and looking for the best way in. She didn’t have a clear game plan yet, only that she wanted him to leave this field broken. But she had a sense of how she was going to do it.

“I don’t know if you know this, Chris, but I have my Master’s Degree now. It’s okay that you didn’t keep tabs on me; I understand it was easier to forget about the children your family orphaned.” She kept her tone conversational, which turned out to be a good choice because it took him a minute to realize what she’d said and bristle in offense. By that time it was too late, she was already moving on.

“Anyways, I have an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies. I know, pretty funny, right? I’m sure you think a werewolf with a college degree is funny anyways. Doesn’t really fit your narrative about how we’re dumb animals. I’m sure if you had your way we wouldn’t be allowed in.”

Once again, his objection wasn’t formulated fast enough. She was getting a sense of what she had to do to make this go how she wanted it to, now; she just had to make it clear that it was her turn to talk, and to keep attacking straight on, let him stay in this shocked huffy place where he couldn’t get his bearings. She could do that.

“So, anyways. What we’re going to do now is a little exercise, one of the things I learned in my classes. Modified slightly, obviously. The basic idea is that, because you and I have too much history to speak clearly to each other, we let a third party do it for us instead. Only, I think you’ve pretty much said what you came here to, so I guess I’ll be the one talking. Scott here is going to help me make my point. Sounds like fun, right Scott?”

“Uh. I guess so?” Scott was giving her a deeply skeptical look. That was valid.

“Awesome. So, Scott, I’m going to ask you some questions! And you’re going to answer honestly, which you would have done even without me saying so because you’re an honest sort of dude. He is, isn’t he Chris?”

“Not in my experience.” Scott flinched at the calm pronouncement. Laura was going to make Argent pay for that, too, for the shame she could now smell.

“Really. Huh. Funny how you get what you ask for from people, isn’t it. So, Scott, first question: why is Chris Argent here today?”

“Uh.” Scott looked increasingly dubious about her sanity, but he did answer the question after a moment of thought. “To…tell you to leave town?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Why?”

“Because he thinks you’re going to hurt people.”

“Why does he think that?”

“Because you’re a werewolf.” This was going well. Argent was looking bored and annoyed.

“Who does Chris Argent think deserves to live, Scott?”

“Humans.”

“All humans? Even if they’re murderers, or abusers?”

“Yes.”

“And who does Chris Argent think deserves to die?” Scott dropped his eyes at that, but his heartbeat stayed steady. He was feeling pain, Laura realized, not because he was being put on the spot but because he was remembering. He was remembering the people the Argents had sentenced to die, and it hurt him. This poor, sweet kid had such powerful empathy that she was afraid for him, suddenly but deeply, a sharp flash that almost had her reaching out and trying to snatch him away from the insubstantial danger.

“Werewolves who have hurt people.”

“What about werewolves who haven’t hurt people?”

Scott’s eyes shuttered for a moment, thinking. Argent smirked, smug and righteous, and Laura hated it. She knew this was his narrative, it being a clean equation of action and consequence. And maybe Scott had swallowed it, who knew. She knew plenty of werewolves who had, who convinced themselves that toeing the line and begging for clemency was the right thing to do. The ones who went out and killed the non-collaborators themselves so the hunters wouldn’t have to, just in the hopes of buying a little more goodwill. If Scott, sixteen and scared and ashamed, thought he could feel just a little bit better by pretending that this man wouldn’t kill him as long as he was a Good Werewolf, if he wanted to repeat his rhetoric right now, Laura would understand.

“He wants them to give him a reason.”

 _Hot damn_. Goddamn, Scott McCall, if this were a less tense situation Laura would have high-fived the shit out of him for that. The smirk dropped off of Argent’s face. It was one of those moments Laura lived for, the moment you saw in someone’s eyes that you had put a crack in what they thought they knew about themselves and the world, and the light might finally be filtering in.

“Have you ever hurt anyone Scott? Physically?”

“…yes.”

“Who?”

“Peter Hale.”

“Good job. Anyone else?”

“I…Jackson, one time, in lacrosse. Danny too, he said it was fine but he limped for like a whole day. Derek, we had a fight, though he won so I don’t know if that counts? Isaac, Erica, and Boyd, they attacked me first but it was still shitty of me. And I couldn’t help that security guard Peter killed in the school, or all the people Matt killed.”

Scott smelled sick with guilt, but that was nothing compared to how Argent smelled. Laura considered her next question carefully, and went with the blatant.

“How old are you, Scott?”

He shot her a weird frown. He didn’t understand how he looked, big soft eyes and earnest mouth, biting his lip as he talked about how he felt responsible for keeping everyone around him safe.

“Uh, sixteen.”

“And does Chris Argent think you deserve to die, Scott?”

“I’m…right now, I’m not sure.” Scott darted a glance up at Argent. He was tentative at first, but then he seemed to remember something and his jaw firmed. His voice when it next came was angry. “He doesn’t want me here. He doesn’t want me near him or Allison. He doesn’t want me to be the way I am. And if I ever do anything wrong, he’ll kill me.”

He was breathing hard now, and Laura figured that was probably enough. She risked resting a hand on his shoulder, and felt the muscle there jump under her palm.

“Thanks Scott. I really appreciate you working with me on that. I’ve got it from here.”

His mouth worked for a second, not resistant so much as processing, and then he nodded. She nodded back, trying to infuse it with all the respect he’d instilled in her with how he’d handled her questions, and then re-focused on her target.

“So, Chris. If you’re going to come here, knife in your sleeve and gun at your side and tell me to get out of town—your town, apparently—in what’s ‘not a territory negotiation’ because those have rules and customs you’d have to follow, in a warning that looks to me a whole lot like straight-up intimidation, then I’m going to let you know how very little justification you have to say this shit.

“Exactly what right do you have to judge me as dangerous when you know literally nothing about me besides my species? What data other than pure, blatant prejudice could you possibly have to make that deliberation, or to consider yourself qualified to kick me out of Beacon Hills based on it? What exactly have I done? But that doesn’t matter. We’re all of us guilty to you, aren’t we. From the day we’re born, from the exact minute, you’re just waiting for us to break our probation. We come into this world with two strikes against us. Not that that’s unique. Your people are good at showing your clemency that way, for all sorts of reasons.”

He huffed in a huge, offended breath at that. People like him always did; call them a killer and they’d shrug and tell you your mother had deserved it. Call them a racist, though, and they’d leap to defend themselves. She didn’t give him a chance.

“This is the part where I break things down for you, Chris. You are not a moral authority. You are not an average citizen defending the interests of those like you. You are a violent, twisted killer with no check on your power. You are a white man with deadly weapons, which is damn near the scariest thing on this earth. You are a terror. You are the monster stalking this sixteen-year-old boy from the shadows.”

“You know _nothing_ about me,” he snapped. It was a parental scolding, that ‘you’ve crossed a line young lady’ sort of statement that he apparently thought was going to cow her. He didn’t realize that, thanks to his family, Laura hadn’t had a father in a long, long time. She wasn’t in the habit of bowing to that tone any more.

“Oh, I really, really do. See, Chris, us hunted, we don’t study your physiology or your powers. We don’t strap you down to tables and peel your skin off and see how long it takes you to die and record it in a little notebook. We don’t care about how you run or bleed, and the specifications for your weapons are available on the manufacturers’ websites. So instead we study what you believe. All the things you tell yourselves and your children that make you turn out so damn fucked up that you go out at night looking for someone to kill.”

“We look for people to protect,” he said. That voice probably worked on a lot of people, the flat, deep tone of male authority. Laura was so _very_ familiar with that voice and she knew exactly the timbre to give her own in response, the perfect balance between assuredness and anger and not too high-pitched. _Watch me perform your masculinized leadership role better than you, asshole. Watch it and suck my dick_. 

“That’s what I’m talking about, yep. When was the first time you heard that sentence? When was the first time you used it to make yourself feel good?

“Because, in case you haven’t admitted this to yourself yet, what you do to us? It’s not about ideology. It’s about fantasy. It’s about how it makes you feel. The protectors of humanity, the hunters in the night, strong and silent and so ~manly~ when you take on the evil beasts. It’s kinda fun, isn’t it? That feeling of passing judgement, all swift and clean and sexy like an executioner’s blade? The way you get to square your jaw all action hero and declare that this time they’ve gone too far? You get to be anything you want, when you tell this story. You’re not a regular person who forgets to buy groceries and is scared of being alone: you’re justice. You’re a _warrior_. What would you have done with your life, if we hadn’t been real? Would it have been anywhere near as thrilling? Would it have given you the same satisfaction in your _balls_ that the chance to kill and still call yourself a good person does?”

“Look me in the eyes and tell me you’ve never, not once, been glad that we’re evil so that you can be sure you’re not. Look at me and tell me you’ve never in your life been grateful that we’re here, because with us to hate you don’t have to think very hard about anything else. Tell me that, I dare you.

“And Chris? Remember, when you answer, that I can hear it if you lie. I’m sure your bloodstained torture notebooks told you that.”

She planted her feet a little wider as she stared at him and waited. Dropped her shoulders, even clasped her hands behind her back to make the posture more overtly military. ‘The savage animal mimics the discipline of the soldier’, she mentally titled the piece. ‘Anything you can do I can do better’ worked too.

After a long, long moment of meeting her eyes, blue versus hazel, he dropped his gaze. She was sure his illustrious family genocide notes would have told him what that meant to a werewolf, too.

“Yeah. Good. Now, while I’ve got you—because I’m sure you’ve come to this point before, haven’t you? Faced this truth and backed away from it? Realized how much easier it was not to think about it?—here’s how it’s going to be. I will deal with Allison as the Argent matriarch. I will accept no treaty, no communication, _no Code_ , that does not come directly from her. And I will ask her every single time if it’s what she wants and believes, and I will know if she lies. Allison is in charge of this Argent branch from this day forward, and interactions will be conducted according to the traditions we both know are in place to keep the balance. Or else.

“And just to make it clear, because, remember, I know how you people think? ‘Or else’ from me is nothing like you’ve ever seen before. ‘Or else’ from me involves no blood. No death. It involves lawyers, Chris. And press. And all the attacks your nasty little systems of supremacy are set up to facilitate. I am not here to play into your technicolor fantasy of my bestial nature. I am not here to toe your line and apologize when you shift the boundaries under me, either; I am here to follow the laws of California, of my family, and of basic equity and respect between thinking beings.”

She got the sense Argent wasn’t used to people meeting him and fighting him on the ideological level. He’d been the thinker in his family, she did remember that from her few observations of their interactions. Ms. Argent had been the tactician, Gerard the bloody general, Kate in his footsteps as an assassin. Chris had been the one with the justifications, the deliberations; the few times the Argent matriarch had made a speech, Laura had had her suspicions that most of the turns of phrase came from her son.

Talia hadn’t needed Laura to write her speeches. But this was indisputably Laura’s ground now; passionate, articulate rants were obnoxious in a friend or sibling, but damned if it wasn’t worth it when she got to the bargaining table. She’d browbeaten top New York City Alphas more than once, Chris Argent wasn’t even a fucking challenge.

“If our business is concluded, then I guarantee you safe passage from me and mine back to your territory.” The ritual phrasing was such an elegant way to end a negotiation, she’d always thought. It was the classiest ‘we’re done here, fuck off’ you could possibly think of.


End file.
